


I Don't Believe In Fairy Tales (but I believe in you and me)

by Amerou



Series: The Cahill Project [5]
Category: 28 Weeks Later (2007), Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Courtship, Discussion of Rape, F/M, Fic within a Fic, Gore, Hansel & Gretel have spent the last century on ice, Magical Diseases, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misunderstandings, Multiple Crossovers, Past Abuse, Present Tense, Slow Build, Strange ideas about courtship, Tagging this is an absolute nightmare, Tags may change without warning, The Unusual Avengers Legacy Protocol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:57:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 67,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amerou/pseuds/Amerou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world has moved on without him, but perhaps a few centuries of a magical sleep is worth all he's paid for it, if it means he meets Maria Hill; Hansel is too old to believe in happily ever after, and Maria has never believed in knights in shining armor, but sometimes the whole of a thing is greater than the sum of its parts. </p><p>A side story of The Unusual Avengers Legacy Protocol.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Breath of Life

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Grimm Truth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/498313) by [GalahadsGurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalahadsGurl/pseuds/GalahadsGurl). 



> First off, this mad, mad idea and even more insane pairing is all the fault of GalahadsGurl and her ridiculously complicated crossover, [The Unusual Avengers Legacy Protocol](http://archiveofourown.org/works/498313/chapters/873638). Fairy Tales will make absolutely zero sense if you are unfamiliar with her setting, and I'm playing in her sandbox with her permission, full knowledge and complete cooperation. 
> 
> This story is ongoing, written as inspired, and considered mostly canon with Legacy Protocol, barring minor details I haven't fixed by press time. All the important things jive.
> 
> (Hansel's accent is directly inspired by the Jaegermonster of Girl Genius. I thought the play on 'jaeger' [hunter] was cute.)
> 
> Title taken from "Wonderland" by Natalia Kills.

It starts, like all the oldest and best stories do, with a kiss. 

All stories hold within them a grain of truth, and the truth is this: a kiss, freely given, is one of the most powerful acts in all creation. A kiss can both destroy hearts and mend them; a kiss can seal bargains, and tear them asunder; a kiss can build armies, raze empires, show affection and mark betrayal. A kiss is a token and a contract and a promise and a curse - an _oath_ in all senses of the word, and like all powerful things, it is two-edged and two-sided, and apt to turn in the hands of those who wield it carelessly. It is poisonous and bracing, generous and full of deception. A kiss can ravage worlds, and then fabricate new ones in the vacant spaces left behind.

A kiss can end life, but for Hansel Kuhn, a kiss bestows it.

It's not much of one, not really - not by the standards of the original Brothers Grimm, the ones that date back to Hansel's time (he sees it for himself, later, on the surveillance tapes: the woman bent over him on a whim, a chaste press of her soft pink lips to his own, rough and bloodlessly white, frowning slightly even then) but it's never been the _technique_ that matters, only the intent. Hansel remembers the curse and the fall, remembers the darkness-dreams, endless and all-consuming. Into that seamless blackness came light, all at once, and the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes, two hundred years after they last fell shut, is Maria Hill's face.

She flees from him, of course (the one and only time he can remember her _ever_ having fled from anything, in all the course of their long, complicated history) but then, even later when he has the space and the luxury of time to think, he can't really blame her for it. How else would a woman as staid and well-grounded as the Assistant Director react, when confronted with the evidence of a dead man come back to life? 

(And no matter what the SHIELD scientists tell him about stasis and curses and catatonia, attempting to explain with large words and narrow focus what happened to him while he nods his head politely, Hansel knows that he's been dead these long centuries - wrapped up in the dark like a body wrapped in the weeds of a lakebed. It was just that his body forgot to stop breathing, his heart to stop beating, his mind to stop dreaming.

He was dead, and now he is alive, and no matter what the scientists tell him, the simple explanation is usually the best.)

Maria runs - but carefully, a controlled, tactical retreat, showing her back to him only when her hand meets the door to the exam room and she is well out of his reach. The oddness of it, her thoroughness and poise when confronted with something so strange and alarming, sticks with him, and her backwards advance is why Hansel terrorizes his nurses, the snarling invective rolling off of his tongue in harsh German at odds with the keen, detached way he watches how they move, how they react to a disgruntled witch hunter rolling off of his cot to bark at them like a rabid dog. 

When the nurses run, it is with abandon, bolting for the door and never looking back. There are half a dozen ways for him to kill them before they reach the hallway behind his room, openings his hunter's mind enumerates dispassionately and automatically. He doesn't enact any of them, though the impulse twitches in the flex of his fingers, the tightening of his shoulders. Hansel has been too long left to lie still, and the ache to _move_ nags incessantly at his senses, though all he dares to do whilst under watchful eyes (and they _are_ watching him, of that he has no doubt at all) is flop back on his cot and feign exhaustion, closing his eyes for another little while when sleep is the absolute last thing he wants or needs, after two centuries of nightmares. 

But Maria fled no less than the nurses did, and gave him no such chances, her blue eyes riveted to his face right up until she exited the room entirely. It sticks with him for days afterward, even through all the revelations to come, Hansel struggling to keep his head above water through the inundations of new things to learn and absorb. He doesn't see her again for more than a few minutes for damn near a week, if his sense of time hasn't been entirely upset by his long rest, but he thinks of her often in the times between, of what little he knows and what Marina Petrovka has said, pondering it as he stares at the insides of his eyelids and pretends to rest.

She reminds him of Gretel, in a way. The same catlike awareness and wariness, the automatic sense of defiance, like she _expects_ to be sneered at and looked down upon and is only waiting for the opportunity to spit in the faces of those around her; a pessimist, he decides with a slight smile, sketching her out inside his own mind, adding her face to the catalog of portraits he houses in his soul. A woman-warrior, Maria Hill, when all those in her field are men, and searching her for weaknesses at that - someone who stands on her own two feet and needs no one and nothing to push herself above the crowd, who expects the worst of every situation and is so very rarely disappointed. 

God help him, he likes her already. 

Gretel would roll her eyes and laugh at his sentimentality, were she here. He can already hear her words, see the curve of her teasing smile and the slight crinkles at the corners of her nut-brown eyes: _Brother, honestly! Aren't you a little too old to believe in love at first sight?_

She has no idea how true that is, now.

The lack of Gretel, the knowledge that she is _out there_ somewhere, alone and taken advantage of and as helpless to stop it as he was, is like a gaping hole in his chest, the kind of wound that he can only breathe raggedly around and pray doesn't kill him before it can be healed. He'll find her, of course he will - there is no doubt in Hansel's mind that he and his sister will be together again, just like before, like they had for their entire lives - and _when_ he finds her, the terrible justice he will exact upon her tormentors will be the kind of black legends whispered in the dark behind locked doors. There will be no stopping him, until the last one who dared to touch him and his sister is hunted down and unspeakable things enacted upon their flesh. 

Hansel Kuhn has never shied away from the necessities of the hunt, and he has learned many, many things that ought to never again see the light of day.

But he is nothing if not pragmatic, and there is precious little he can do, locked deep in what is for all intents and purposes an enemy castle; and Hansel has always been the patient one, the steady foundation, the blackened stone to counterpoint Gretel's fire. He can wait for his opportunity. 

Besides, Maria kissed him. 

A man can learn to subsist on a few motes of hope.


	2. Going Walkabout

It takes about four days for Hansel to get fed up with captivity, and another two to do something about it. 

From the moment Marina Petrovka (and _there_ is a woman who plays her cards so close to her chest that they may as well not exist) hands him that tattered old photograph of the boys she calls the Brothers Grimm, a tentative sort of plan forms in the back of his mind; SHIELD is diligent enough about seeing him plied with all the basics of life (and _Gott in Himmel,_ Hansel has never made such pornographic noises in his _**life**_ as when he is introduced to modern-day hot showers) but he is a hunter at his core, and being kept like a bird in a cage chafes at him in ways that he can never adequately explain.

Ever since that night his own father left him and Gretel to die in the Black Forest, Hansel's first inclination has always been to mistrust - and Marina Petrovka's initial appearance at his bedside, conveniently motherly and appropriately ingratiating, triggers every warning flag that Hansel has. He drinks the water she offers despite the chance of poison (though honestly, why go through the trouble of waking him in the first place only to kill him once he'd done so?), allows her to touch him and to answer his questions and to lead him through their conversations in his mother-tongue. He allows the nurses and the subsequent trail of psychiatrists to talk over his head to each other, pointless magpie chatter that eventually causes him to drive them away again, this time on pure temper, roaring in his (admittedly terrible) accented English until they scatter - he even allows Petrovka to mutter to herself in the vague hope that she will reveal something of tactical use. 

All told, he's been extraordinarily patient while his captor-hosts poke and prod at him. Hansel has, aside from scaring the living dog shit out of his nurses, been quiet and observant and remarkably calm for a man out of his own time; simple things that those around him take for granted, such as the fluorescent lighting (and _that_ had taken a day or two for Hansel to adjust to, once he'd realized no candle could ever burn so bright or so pale) and the tiled floors, even the metal supports on his cot, machined smooth and strong, fascinate him. Glimpses of what the world has become in his long absence make him ache to explore it, but for now the door is locked between the visits of the nurses and Petrovka and, once, Maria Hill's unsmiling face.

That she returned of her own will is a good sign, Hansel thinks, but the constraints of the exam room, watched by unseen prying eyes, make it difficult for them both to relax. He ends up snappish and quiet, not at all how he wants their conversation to go, and Maria, fury in her teal-blue eyes, leaves shortly after she came, her bootsteps strident on the ceramic tiles.

Hansel needs to _get out_ or he's going to go utterly insane from inactivity.

The finish to the plan doesn't slot into place until he meets his 'sons', though, and appraises them all face to face - because while meeting them is unsurprisingly like being punched in the stomach, the oldest pair look so damn much like him (especially the eldest, Will of the mercurial blue-grey-green eyes, who practically exudes competence in command) that he sees an opportunity even through the haze of emotional difficulties. He can never quite turn off the part of his mind that is a hunter, after all.

The rest of it is easy - his clothes have already been replaced with modern counterparts called 'fatigues', scratchy but more breathable than the linen and leather of Hansel's day, and the only time he lays a hand on one of his nurses (they always come in pairs, now) it's a cover for palming the small plastic square from her pocket, the one that opens the locked door to his room. His watchers have grown complacent enough that when Hansel pretends to go to sleep, they obligingly douse the lights, ingratiating themselves into his consciousness with such gentle touches, attempting to instill in him some sort of sense of trust. But he waits, his breaths even and slow, pacing the minutes with heartbeats; when he judges that his unwitting gaolers ought to have lost interest, he rolls off the bed, all one smooth movement to land in a crouch on the cold tiled floor, the tips of his fingers pressed to the ceramic and his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. 

The human eye is more sensitive to motion in the dark, and Hansel studies the observation window for the slightest flicker of change; seeing none, he moves low across the exam room, plucking up his boots as he goes, the small white square clenched in his teeth. Once he's at the door, he slithers into his boots and hurriedly laces them, then reaches up to take the card from his mouth and swipe it at the door, just the same as he's seen his visitors do. (It's amazing, what a quiet, clever man with keen eyesight can learn that his hosts obviously never intended for him to pick up, but then, adaptation had always been one of Hansel's greatest strengths. Survival of the fittest, and all that.)

A little light over the doorknob turns green, and just like that, Hansel is out the door, card in his pocket and robin's egg eyes casting up and down the hallway. The entire operation, start to finish, takes only seconds. 

He picks a direction at random and starts walking, shoulders back and stride assured; there's a trick to it, this kind of subtle infiltration, because the human mind is conditioned to accept that when a man walks like he's going somewhere, like he _belongs_ , the natural reaction is not to question him. Just _walking_ unimpeded by the tiny exam room is like a religious experience, though, the long muscles in his thighs singing joyously from the unexpected surge in his gait, and Hansel squelches a smile as he explores further into what is an increasingly labyrinthine maze of corridors, most of them helpfully labelled as to their purpose. (He'd come from the Medical Wing, apparently, as best he could puzzle out; German and English aren't terribly different text-wise, but the consonants are all wrong, and it's one thing to know a language and quite another to read it.) 

Hansel figures he has ten, maybe fifteen minutes before whoever is watching the room realizes that its occupant is no longer inside it, and in the meantime he means to make the best of the excursion, nodding his head in faux recognition to those he passes (a few call him 'sir' and one mistakes him for Colonel Grimm, which makes it difficult to maintain the stoic mask) and moving with artful purpose, as though he actually has a destination in mind. 

It feels like fate when he finds the gun range. 

Later, Hansel will only hear secondhand (Jason, laughing so hard he snorts his drink up his nose as he relates the tale the video footage tells) of how the eldest Grimm and his partner chewed the asses of the rangemaster and security personnel for allowing this to happen; if Hansel turned out to be an unfriendly, he could have _devastated_ the base and killed quite a lot of otherwise innocent soldiers, either by holing up in the gun cage or taking what supplies he could and making a break for off-post. To be fair, one of the younger brothers points out, only a handful of people on the entire base have been briefed as to Hansel's **existence** , nevermind his wakefulness, and none of _them_ are cleared lower than Eyes Only. The NCOs and basic enlisted can hardly be expected to divine that the man with the pale blue eyes is not, in fact, one of the Grimm brothers, not when the resemblance is the kind of uncanny that seems to have more basis in horror stories than in real life. Petrovka seemingly has no difficulties in telling the brothers apart, but most mere mortals cannot boast of the same. 

That said, the rangemaster really should realize something is up when the so-called Grimm brother crouches in front of the gun rack and runs his callused hands over the weapons, as reverently as if he were handling holy relics. 

The weapons of Hansel's day had been effective, but relatively primitive machinery - aside from the pop-up Gatling and his & Gretel's own personal shotguns, their favorites by far, the Kuhn armory had consisted of firearms that could barely be given the name. Compared to the sleek engines of death before him in the rack, his old shotgun is like a pointy stick compared to a scalpel. He spies its modern-day descendant in the corner, plucks it up expertly to weigh it in his hands; the balance is exquisite, the smooth machined lines of the barrel and stock elegant and perfect. Just _holding_ the damn thing makes his pulse jump, and he runs his fingers over the weapon, face intent, like he's learning the curves of a lover. It's not until the rangemaster shifts his weight, a subtle soft noise of fabric rubbing against itself, that Hansel remembers that he isn't alone with such an exquisitely-wrought piece of absolute destruction.

(When Petrovka and Will watch this part of the surveillance footage, afterward, the Colonel will laugh and rub at the bridge of his nose, and say that if he ever doubted that Hansel was truly their progenitor, this right here erases the last of his uncertainty. The former Russian spy will only smirk, apparently having not had any doubts about that at all.)

"Is a lane open?" he says into the waiting silence, knowing that the rangemaster is staring at him; the consonants of the English words feel strange on his tongue, threatening to get away from him, and his voice is rough and full of gravel from two centuries of disuse, but he schools it into a decent imitation of the boys' accents without blowing his cover. The rangemaster, startled, stammers a "Sir yes sir" and unlocks the door to the range, offers shells, clear glasses to protect his eyes, a set of odd-looking earmuffs that Hansel can only assume are meant to dampen the noise of the shot. 

It takes everything he has in him not to sling the shotgun over his shoulder, like he and Gretel used to do in days of old, and the strange earmuffs feel alien and cold on the sides of his head, but the effort of the deception is more than worth it. The first time he fires a shot, dead center of a bullseye unfeasibly far downrange for such a close-use weapon, is the first time he feels truly safe, truly _human_ , in over a week. The curse took two hundred years from him, and it took his sister and his understanding of the world and even the sanctity of his own body, but it can't take his aim, his skills - and when you have _nothing_ left but your own two hands, well. That has to be enough to make a start.

He's still in the shooting stall, shells lined up in neat rows on the counter before him and his groupings admirably tight on the little paper target, when his would-be captors finally find him. He's aware of them long before they approach, sees Petrovka and Maria and the Colonel from the corner of his eye all descending upon the rangemaster like a flock of angry crows. His hands move unerringly to reload while his mind is still and serene, listening only absently to the shouting in between shots; the black shotgun fits in his hands like it was made for him, and he is too busy learning the weapon's intricacies and machining and choke and all her little quirks to be entirely concerned with the officers at his back. 

It is, of course, AD Maria Hill that they send to fetch him off the range, universally agreed as the one who has the best chance of disarming him without collateral damage. (If Will had put his foot down and absolutely forbidden his lover from attempting to take on an escapee German with a firearm, well, no one has to know that but the three of them.) He's reached the end of his current round of shells, so he sets the shotgun down on the counter, takes the opportunity to paw off the headgear so it lolls around his neck, and stretches his arms up over his head, shoulders rolled and one hand gripping the opposing wrist, making his joints pop with loud champagne noises. He can hear Petrovka and Will somewhat more clearly now, her voice lowered back into its usual register, while the Colonel's has dropped an entire octave, the kind of growl that goes directly to the lizard hind-brain and tends to make small children seize up in place from terror; the words are indistinct at this distance, but the threat implicit needs no explanation, nor does the way the rangemaster's gone white as a sheet. Maria, on the other hand, is calm, cool and collected in her sleek navy uniform, one brown brow ticked up over her teal eyes, arms folded across her chest and booted feet shoulder-width apart. She couldn't look any more unimpressed if she tried. 

That doesn't stop her from glancing at the way his shirt clings to the muscles underneath when he stretches, though, her eyes briefly dipping down into the lines of his ribs and chest, and Hansel has to bite down hard on the impulse towards a rather childish grin. If she is anything at all like Gretel, a smile right now will probably get him shot. Nothing fatal, of course (that would be _unprofessional_ ) but just enough to hurt like hell if he has to walk or move or breathe. 

"Do you have _any_ idea how much trouble you've caused, Herr Kuhn?" Her voice is flat, hard and just as inscrutable as her face; it takes guts to take the direct approach to a man within arm's reach of a shotgun and a more than working knowledge of its mechanics, but the sheer size of the big brass balls on this woman just makes Hansel like her more. He lets his arms fall at his sides, decidedly well away from the shotgun or the neat line of red shells marching down the counter. Maria's got a sidearm on her thigh, after all, and Hansel is sure she knows how to use it.

" _Sprechen Sie Deutsch?_ " he replies, unable to resist a bit of harmless playground hair-pulling; it's the wrong response, from the way her eyes narrow fractionally, but beyond her he thinks he sees Petrovka biting the inside of her lips against a smile. _Matchmaker,_ he pegs her immediately; he's been wondering why Maria had been sent to him to suffer through his horrid English, instead of the woman who spoke passably fluent German. (And maybe, Petrovka had not fought her lover's edict as hard as she otherwise might, but that is a secret that will die with her.) In all honesty, he isn't entirely _averse_ to Petrovka's plotting, but a massacre of truly horrendous proportions would be in the offing, should Maria ever become aware of it. 

Blessedly, Maria is a little too busy glaring coldly at Hansel to notice the way Petrovka has suddenly fallen silent, back where Will stands tearing the rangemaster a new asshole. "Your English is fluent enough, when it suits you," she notes in the tones of a woman used to male insubordination, and also one ready to quash it should it prove necessary. "I could have you court-martialed for impersonation of an officer of the military."

His English isn't _so_ good that he knows all the words, precisely, but he can guess from her tone and context what she means, rolling his shoulder again to relieve some of the ache of shooting. The shotgun is a faithful, reliable weapon, but the recoil can be hell on his musculature, and two centuries of sleep on top of a week of captivity means Hansel is somewhat out of shape. "I didn't." He doesn't bother modulating his accent now (because what would be the point, with the deception unmasked?) and the consonants come out sharp, the vowels clipped and truncated, like he's biting off the ends of the words as they leave his mouth. "I only walked. People see what they want to see." 

The comment makes her scoff, a soft exhalation of breath as her eyes tighten the tiniest bit. Something he has said hit a little too close to home, for Maria Hill. "Theft of government property still stands." Hansel feels his own face darken as he mirrors her posture, folding his own arms across his chest. The gesture is suitably impressive with the short sleeves of the fatigues; for all that he has been idle too long, the muscles in his arms have not atrophied. 

"I am not _property_. Not of anyone's," and his accent thickens somewhat with the slight rise in his temper, but Hansel makes an effort to rein it back in. "Hyu overstep the line."

"I meant the keycard and ammunition." Her brow arches towards her hairline again, the agent unphased by the minor show of pique from Hansel. They're testing each other, probing for weakness and cracks in their respective armors, and though it is impossible for him to tell her opinion, the more he sees, the more he admires her courage. "There are mountains of paperwork for these things, you know. Retroactive requisitions forms, inventory, licensing and loss prevention, not to mention the protocols involved in disciplinary actions for the soldiers you've tricked today. I've half a mind to sit you down at a desk and make you go through every last bit of it. In triplicate." 

"Anything would be better than sitting alone in a locked room, waiting to be let out," he says, staring back at her, standing his ground much as Maria stands hers. "Hyu have a very nice prison here, but it is still a prison."

She gives him a look that says, very clearly across the gap between them, _Don't be such a child._ "You could have _asked_." Like an adult. "Breaking out of your room is hardly going to reflect well on your ability to behave yourself."

It's Hansel's turn to scoff now, blue eyes rolling heavenward. "As if there were any chance at all hyu would have said yes. Give me a _leetle_ credit." His arms unfold, and he spreads his hands to either side of him, practically an invitation to view him as critically as she pleases; he does not amount to much, not in this strange modern world, and not enough to fear her disapproval. "I am a hunter, a warrior. Hyu see what I can do, with a leetle watching, a leetle planning. I think," and he knows his eyes are glinting hard as flint, has seen this expression on his sister's face, but at that precise moment he hardly cares, "that to hyu I am dangerous. In more ways than one. And things that are dangerous, hyu lock them up until hyu decide what to do with them."

Maria's face and attitude does not change, but her pupils wheel and spin. "And what is it that you think I should do with _you_ , Herr Kuhn?"

He leans forward somewhat, edging ever so slightly into her personal space, and though he doesn't dare show it on his face, he is privately pleased that she does not retreat, even with a frowning witch hunter looming over her. It would take more than that, much more, to frighten Maria Hill. "Hyu would be much better off, Frau Hill," he says so very quietly, soft as cat's paws across the sand, "making me an ally, instead of an enemy." 

Maria works her jaw a moment, his robin's egg eyes locked to her teal ones, before she says calmly, "Fraulein." 

" _Vas?_ " blinks Hansel, caught off of his guard enough to slip back into German just for a moment; Maria clears her throat and breaks her gaze away, not a retreat, exactly, because she is marshaling her forces behind her eyes and needs a moment to recoup them. She glances directly back up at him as if she never looked away at all. 

"It's Fraulein Hill. I never married." She finally unfolds her arms to allow her hands to rest at her sides, tips her head to the side ever so slightly; another woman might have blushed at such an admission, but Maria presents it like an obstacle, a _challenge_ , daring him to make comment on something so personal. When he doesn't, when all he does is curve the corners of his mouth in the ghost of a smile, she turns away from him and starts to pace back towards the Colonel and Petrovka, her boots ringing out on the concrete floor. "Coming, Herr Kuhn?"

That slight smile blooms into a genuine grin the moment her back is turned, and Hansel, always one to follow proper gun etiquette, slings the shotgun across his shoulder and follows her.


	3. Reconnaissance

"So that's the secret?" laughs Clint, drawing the nocked bow back with one surprisingly powerful hand, loosing the arrow in a puff of air and nylon fletchings such that it soars downrange, landing in the target with a low _thunk_. There's half a quiver of the arrow's matched siblings already embedded in the wood, but neither of them are ready just yet to fetch the automated gantry, the groan of the machinery disruptive to conversation and grating on the senses. "You just -" Clint gestures, flashing the leather palm of his archery glove, " _walk tall_ and that's it, all of a sudden you can walk past half of base security like it's nothing?"

"If hyu believe that hyu _belong_ there, the ones around hyu will believe it, too." Hansel is at Clint's eight o'clock, three feet to the left and behind of the young man that the hunter still struggles to think of as his youngest son, just enough room to observe without interfering with the draw the massive bow requires; the older man is smiling, leaned against the steel sidewall of the shooting lane with his hands in his pockets, but he is unable to relax quite to the degree that he ought to. It isn't that Clint is bad company - which he isn't - or that Hansel doesn't wish to be here - which he does. The fresh air, the drumming of thunder and rain rain on the range roof, the knowledge that he is at last free to move about as he wishes (or very nearly so; Hansel will have to have A Discussion with Major Petrovka about the requirement of an escort, because while he is stranded in a time not his own, that does not mean he has to be _babysat_ , like a fractious child) all of these things are bracing, encouraging. Hansel breathes free air and begins to learn the young man who is so much like him and yet so much _un_ like him. But Hansel cannot rid himself of the tension he carries in his shoulders, and though he pretends to himself that he does not know the reason why, the little nagging voice inside his heart, the one that sounds suspiciously like Gretel, does not have the patience for Hansel's bullshit.

The problem, and the truth, is this: it is _painfully_ obvious that Clint wants so very desperately for Hansel to be a father figure, and Hansel, whose only model for such a role left him and his sister for dead in a German forest when he was eight, is quite certain that he doesn't know how to be a _good_ one.

(Were it Hansel's decision, he might never have had children at all. Some mistakes ought never be repeated.)

He knows how to be a brother, though. A good brother, strong and loyal and fierce, and he thinks that being a father worthy of the name cannot be so very different from that; he has made worse starts from less, has tracked and killed witches on less. That indestructible camaraderie he once shared with Gretel and will one day soon share again, the mutual bonds of love and admiration - that cannot be so very different from how a parent should feel, can it? Hansel feels a sort of strange blossoming pride in his chest whenever he watches the Grimm brood - Will with his steadiness, fleet-minded Jason, fierce Brian, earnest Kenny, and Clint, who is always laughing. Is it filial affection he feels, twisting and knotting in his chest while he watches like an outsider as they roughhouse and tease and play?

How does one go about it, waking from a centuries-long sleep to find oneself father to five strong boys, most of them already grown, men in their own right?

(Gretel once said, to a boy who admired the Kuhns and wanted to hunt witches, that there is no such thing as an apprenticeship to being a hunter; that the school of hunting is the world and every exam bears for failure the penalty of death, nothing less; that the only teachers are experience, luck and time, and sometimes, the best that even a veteran hunter can do is prepare everything they can, cross their fingers, and pray like hell.

Hansel wonders if being a father is not much the same.)

"Mind hyur back foot, _Falki_ ," Hansel notes as Clint drops back into the shooting stance, and Hansel reaches out with a toe to nudge Clint's ankle back into the proper alignment with the rest of his lean frame. Clint pulls a face and makes a moue of disgruntlement - at the diminutive nickname or at the correction, it isn't quite clear - but Hansel sees when the archer turns his attention back to the target that his grey eyes are gleaming, the boy secretly pleased, and warmth blooms in Hansel's chest. Perhaps this is not so difficult an endeavor after all.

"It _can't_ be that simple," persists Clint, drawing another arrow from the quiver, nocking it with smooth, practiced motions so absently performed that Hansel has no trouble at all believing that he has been doing this for much of his life. "That might get you through a door or two, but it can't possibly last for long."

Another arrow arcs downrange, the bow creaking pleasantly under the forces required to propel its ammunition, and Hansel watches the unerring flight into the target before he replies. "Sometimes a door or two is all hyu need. Sometimes all hyu need are a few seconds, a few minutes. A leetle distance. A witch is at her most dangerous in close." And the words are already out of his mouth before Hansel realizes that he sounds _exactly_ like a man training his son in the family craft; Clint, blessedly, does not seem to notice, shaking out his bow arm for another shot as thunder cracks impossibly loudly overhead.

(Were it Hansel's decision, any sons he might have had would not be exposed to the horrors of the hunt, to mud and blood and trudging through the snow holding your own guts in with your hands, else they spill out of your frame. That is a fate he would wish upon no child, much less one of his own.)

"Eh, I see better at a distance anyway," says Clint, unaware of his prospective father's thoughts, already reaching for another arrow. Sweat sheens his arms and his brow, but his eyes are bright, his grin easy; Hansel probably ought to tell him not to overdo it, to pace himself and allow his muscles some time to recover between shots of what is easily a hundred pound draw weight on the gorgeous bow, but the boy seems so _happy_ that Hansel can't bring himself to actually speak the admonition.

"Hyu watch things?" asks Hansel, smiling once again, a small, private one that he rarely allows himself the luxury of wearing anymore.

"All the time," Clint says easily, loosing another arrow and making a fist-pumping gesture when it barrels into the ass-end of one of its predecessors. "A Robin Hood, _hell_ yes. _Now_ you're officially broken in, baby," and even staid Hansel can't help the quiet laugh when Clint kisses the smooth wood of the bow, as affectionately as if it were his beloved. (That all the Grimm boys carry on love affairs with their weapons does not surprise Hansel in the slightest; the only startlement he has felt on the point at all was the moment he realized that Petrovka is _Will's_ weapon of choice.)

"And do hyu watch people as well?" Hansel inquires, gently, ever so gently; he's gradually coming around to a certain point, but he doesn't want to startle Clint with it when he arrives there. Even now, the hunter cannot pause in his hunt for information, to feel more secure and aware of the world around him. There is so much to learn, so much to understand - but it is not the history of this new world, or its technology or its stark differences that will see him in his overdue grave. It is the people who surround him upon which his life depends, because though he thinks Petrovka is a lost cause (that bridge has already been burnt to cinders; Hansel is unsure if the reward of its repair would be worth the effort spent), if he cannot come to trust what remains of his own family, how is he to survive?

"Of course," grins Clint, eager to impress Hansel with his observational skills, and they talk over the grinding machinery and the rolling thunder as Clint recalls the gantry, his arrows embedded solidly within it and heavy enough to make the solid target swing like a pendulum. "I can tell you six things about a man by the way he walks, and four more by how he dresses. It's pretty easy, once you know what to look for." Still talking, Clint goes through the arrows one by one, inspecting the head, the bolt, the flights, the nock, quick but thorough motions in rapid succession under a practiced eye. The arrows are piled on the counter of the stall, stacked like cordwood, and Hansel feels that strange twist in his chest once again. "Sometimes when I'm bored I'll go sit in the mess hall and just watch people, you know, how they act around each other. It's like As The World Turns, but you make up your own dialogue."

Hansel looks blank at the analogy, and Clint rubs the back of his head and studies the ceiling, searching for something to use for clarification. "It's, um. Shit, how do I explain soap operas to someone born in the eighteen-hundreds? Wait, that's it, opera," says Clint, snapping his fingers and grinning. "It's like watching an opera, but you can't hear what they're saying, so you have to figure it out on context. Who sits with who, why is she mad at him, those two are totally having sex, that kind of thing."

The hunter is nodding, the metaphor surprisingly effective, enough so that he feels confident in offering an anecdote of his own. "When we hunt the witches, Gretel and I, she is always the one to stand in front of the crowd, to draw their attention. And I watch their faces, to see who does not act the way they should, who is not surprised or not scared. On a good day, I can spot a witch in the crowd, before she can take any more of the children."

And he knows the next question out of Clint's mouth before the boy asks it, but Hansel is powerless to keep it from spilling into the open air: "Did you save the ones that got taken?"

Hansel lifts a hand to rub at the bridge of his nose, on the downstroke pressing finger and thumb to the inner corners of his closed eyes. " _Nein._ Not always. Not even often." The old sorrow is still laid thick down upon his soul, the knowledge that no matter how many witches he and Gretel killed, there would always be more - that for every child they rescued from the clutches of the _Hexen_ , three more would never again see the light of day. There are failures and then there are _failures_ , and this is one of Hansel's: that for all he has been hunting and killing witches and other monsters for his entire adult life and much of his childhood, he has never before spared a thought for the parents who lost their children to such supernatural predators. Oh, certainly, he has seen them panic, seen them spare no expense in the effort to regain what was lost - but he has never tread so much as a step in those shoes, never felt that terror gnawing cold at his bones, never lost his breath to the icy claws of fear lancing deep into his heart. Call him hardhearted, call him unfeeling and distant; but he is a hunter, and to hold on to that sliver of hope that he can bring back a child alive, he _needs_ that distance, needs the remove, the disconnect, so that when the moment comes he will be swift and sure, and will do what needs to be done.

Just for a second, though, he imagines joking Clint or gentle Kenny - not so far removed from childhood that he cannot picture them in his place - trapped in that house made of candy in the Black Forest, and an utterly alien spike of fear jolts straight up his spine.

(Were it Hansel's decision, his sons would grow up straight and tall and full of sunlight, as far away from violence and darkness as possible; they might learn the gun or the bow or even the sword, because sometimes a silvered blade and the will to use it is the best defense a man can have against the night, but they would never march into battle or to the hunt, never be forced to use the skills they had learned. They would never know the bitter taste of defeat, never feel the pain of seeing a friend fall in war, never lay the corpse of a child at its mother's feet and feel nothing but a vague pang of regret, because to feel anything more would be to feel _everything_ , and a hunter cannot afford to hesitate.

They would never have to listen to their detractors scream and rail at them for their failures, for being too slow, too inaccurate, too _weak_ to bring the children back alive; they would never have to endure the speculations, the accusations, that a man who fights monsters eventually himself becomes one.

They would never have to wonder, staring down into the bottom of a glass on the darkest of nights, if their accusers are right.

But none of these things are Hansel's decision, and all he can do is prepare everything he can, cross his fingers, and pray like hell.)

"Pops?" says Clint, and when Hansel's eyes flutter open, he sees his youngest son is watching him with mild concern upon his familiar face, brows fret over his grey gaze. "Are you okay?"

" _Ja_ , I... I am fine." He shakes his head as if that will be enough to cast away the memories of the past, the bodies that lay piled up around his feet, dragging him down into the abyss with every step. They aren't cobwebs to be swept away, nor things that he can idly ignore, not once they have been dredged up from the deeps.

"Thinking about Aunt Gretel?" Clint asks, not ungently, and though they both know it for a patent falsehood, Hansel is too grateful for the change of subject not to nod his head. Clint's ineffable smile returns as he runs his hands over his bow, checking for cracks or strains in the wood; the gesture has an air of ritual around it, a soothement as much as a habit, and Hansel thinks it rather like when he cleans his weapons after a hunt, a thing to mark the end of a long day. "Would you tell me about her?" the boy adds as he is smoothing his fingers down the length of the string, a little shyly, and Hansel manages a smile for him at last.

"How about I make hyu a bargain?" says Hansel, and the boy's interest is immediately piqued. "I will tell hyu about Gretel, if hyu will tell me about someone in return. Just between us, of course."

Clint's eyes are shining with interest in the mystery of the game, even as he packs away the arrows in their quiver and the bow in its shiny black case. "Oh ho, a mysterious bargain and an even more mysterious _someone?_ Do I get to know who it is before I agree?"

"And where would be the fun in that?" Hansel grins back, then makes an exaggerated shrugging motion with one shoulder, though the way his mouth keeps twitching upwards into a smile ruins all of his attempts at regaining his usual blank, unimpressed face. There is something about the company of his youngest son that makes it impossible for Hansel to remain full of sorrow. "Though, if hyu are not interested...."

"Okay, okay, you got me," grins Clint in return, shouldering the bow case with one arm, the quiver of arrows in his other hand. "I agree to your terms, now tell me who you want to know about so badly."

"Fraulein Hill."

"Fra -" Clint bursts out laughing, as the pair move in lockstep for the entrance to the gun range, his grin impossibly wide in his face. "Oh, man, you are a sneaky sneaker who sneaks, you know that?"

" _In der Liebe und im Krieg ist alles erlaubt,_ " says Hansel quietly, peering through the windows to judge the distance of their run through the rain, the strength of the wind and the pelting of the storm against the sides of the building.

"What's that mean?"

"I will tell hyu when hyu are older," the hunter says as loftily as a king, and Clint makes a face and pushes him lightly on the shoulder, though the both of them are laughing to soften the blow into good-natured teasing. It feels uncommonly _good_ to laugh, to find joy in the small things again; without Gretel his life seems grey and empty, but there is another family here waiting only for him to accept it, to embrace it with all his heart.

While trust comes slow for Hansel Kuhn, watching young Clint as they prepare for the dash through the heart of the storm, Hansel thinks that he can remember how to believe in others again, if they can find it in them to believe in him.

They are just about to make the sprint back to the Grimms' base housing when Clint adds, as last-second as humanly possible, "Oh hey, um, Pops?"

" _Ja?_ "

"Don't mention to my brothers that I watch soap operas, okay?"

 

xxxxx

"So, _Fraulein_ Hill," says the Director with a deceptively unconcerned drawl, hands folded neatly before him on the desk and papers scattered everywhere, "what _is_ it that you propose we do with Hansel Kuhn?"

Maria Hill sits in her chair like she's being graded on it, her back straight, her shoulders back and her feet and knees together, hands in her lap; this is far from the first time she has been the sole point of attention for the laserlike focus of Nick Fury's single eye, and it will be far from the last, but each time she presents as perfect and professional a profile as she can. It isn't to deflect contempt, like it is with other male officers - Fury is that rare commander that doesn't give the first flying fuck what kind of parts she has, so long as she can get the job done - but it's a defense mechanism all the same, a habit that presents a steely outer shell to the world as much as it allows her to get her thoughts into order more rapidly. "I propose that we recruit him, sir. And his sister, if and when she is recovered from captivity."

The eyebrow over Fury's patch rises half an inch. "Recruit him? What, into SHIELD? You want a man straight out of Medieval Times set down smack in the middle of the most advanced technology in the world and told to just have at it?" Fury scoffs softly, leaning back in his chair. "What the hell would we _do_ with him, Assistant Director? Have him teach classes on Dark Ages weaponry and how to kill witches?"

"Sir, with all due respect," returns Maria in tones that imply she means nothing of the sort, "he broke out of a secure facility and bluffed his way into the gun cage on a priority-one military base. That wasn't sheer luck, or at least, not entirely. The first thing we ought to take away from this is that our security protocols need immediate revision, before any other loopholes can be exploited to more disastrous effect. We were the ones who were lucky, sir. Lucky that he isn't inclined to go on a murderous rampage." She pauses a moment, allowing that to sink in. "The second thing is that Hansel Kuhn is clearly more intelligent and adaptable than we initially assessed. With the proper training and equipment, I believe that he could be a valuable asset to SHIELD, and one we ought to snatch up in an official capacity, before someone else beats us to it."

Fury drums his fingers along his desktop, one brown eye boring into Hill's teal ones; as much as Maria respects Nick Fury for the things that he has accomplished, discussion with him always feels to her like they are cobras dancing around one another, each full of venom and ready to strike should it prove necessary. This time, however, there is very little flaring of fang from the Director - he taps the desktop twice, then nods in her direction. "Alright, Hill. I expect an updated assessment of Kuhn on my desk within thirty-six hours, and then we'll see if we can't reel this one in for keeps. This is your baby," he adds, sitting forward in his chair to rake some of the paperwork towards him for is inspection. "Just try to keep the fraternization policy in mind, taking care of it."

Maria stares coldly at the Director, who doesn't so much as glance up at her. "What are you trying to imply, sir?"

"Dismissed, Agent Hill," is Fury's only answer, and Maria has never been so furious as when she storms out of that office. The weight of her gaze alone is enough to make the two ensigns chatting in the hall turn white and scramble to get out of her way, pressing themselves to the walls as she stalks past.

 _Fraternization policy, my left asscheek,_ she growls inside the sanctity of her own mind, heading for the gym to find an agent unlucky enough to draw Maria as a sparring partner, someone she can throw into the mat a few hundred times. Just to take the edge off of her temper.

The whole way, she isn't thinking about Hansel in the gun range, shirt clinging to his chest when he stretches, or the way the corners of his mouth turn upwards when he's thinking about smiling.

She _isn't._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Falki_ \- little hawk (diminutive, affectionate)  
>  _Ja/Nein_ \- Yes/no  
>  _In der Liebe und im Krieg ist alles erlaubt._ \- All is fair in love and war (Lit.: In love and war all things are allowed.)


	4. Reluctance and Revelation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those not sure on the timelime, since GalahadsGurl got so far ahead of me due to my vacation (XD), this is mostly concurrent with Ch.28-30 of Legacy Protocol.

He is insidious, and Maria cannot seem to decide, even within the sanctuary of her own mind, if she ought to hate him for it.

It begins simply enough: Hansel is merely _there_ whenever she does not expect him, a quiet, calm presence in a sea of activity, an island of serenity amidst the chaos of life on post. When she takes her pistols to the range to practice, he is there in one of the far lanes - several times with Will or Clint or Kenny, and once, the occasion remarkable for its rarity, with Brian, the second-eldest Grimm laughing a touch more maniacally than is absolutely required when Hansel holds an assault rifle for the first time. As she travels on foot from office to office, attending meetings or shuffling paperwork, he brushes shoulders with her in the corridors, Hansel always accompanied by one of his sons as they slowly teach him the layout of the base; when she shows up in the gym for PT, or merely for a sparring session with whichever SHIELD agent is unlucky enough to draw Maria in the partner lottery, he is alone with a sandbag in the corner, his back to the gym and unaware of her presence.

When she begins to see him in the mess hall, sitting alone at a table near the corner and picking at his plate with the attitude of a man forced to eat maggots, Maria takes the hint, huffs a sigh and gives in, practically throwing down her lunch tray as she takes a seat across from him. Fate seems determined that Hansel appear in as many aspects of her life as possible until she answers the obstacle that he represents, and Maria has never been one to flee from a challenge.

He jerks when he looks up at the noise of her tray smacking loudly onto the counter, fork dangling between his fingers and robin's egg eyes wide in his rugged face. Maria takes a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that she can startle him out of his thoughts so easily, but he rallies admirably - Hansel stiffens his back and smooths his expression into stone, gestures at the bench across from his as if the impromptu lunch date is an idea of his own crafting. "Fraulein Hill. Please, sit."

"My pleasure, Herr Kuhn," deadpans Maria, legging over the bench to sit primly on the edge, as if she expects to be called to action at any moment. (In a way, she supposes, that is how she lives her life - a series of battles, interspersed by the tension of waiting for the next one.) "I'm surprised to see you here, actually," she notes as she plucks up her fork and stirs her rice. "Don't you and the boys cook, most days?"

"Most days, _ja_ ," he answers, tipping his head to one side as he resumes disconsolately pushing macaroni and cheese around his plate. (The absentminded German is something she will have to break him of eventually, the professional in Maria decides; he already has enough trouble integrating with the new world without constant reminders of his old one. For now, though, the habit is endearing rather than troubling.) "But my sons are all on mission or training, and hyur friend Petrovka with them. There is no one at home," a shrug of his powerful shoulders, the seams of his shirt puckering against the strain, "and no reason to cook, if it is only for myself. Such a waste of food."

"You don't exactly seem eager to eat the mess hall food, though," prompts the Assistant Director, pointing at his plate with her rice-pebbled fork. "It can't be _that_ bad, Herr Kuhn. Jason's not in the kitchen, I promise. There's an actual official military injunction against him coming within two hundred yards of the base stove."

This provokes a smile from Hansel, though it is less a true grin and more a softening of the habitual tightness around his eyes, slight upturns at the corners of his mouth; Maria is quickly learning that the Grimm patriarch is not a man of overt expression - the subtleties of his personality are creeping and quiet, easily overlooked by those who are not sharp of eye or keen of attention. "The base cooks would have to try _very_ hard to be worse than Jason," he allows, a spark of mirth dancing in those bright blue eyes. "Actually, I was thinking about how very...." He lifted his fork, gestured the tip of it in a circle as Maria picked at her plate. " _American_ the food is, in the mess."

"Is that a problem?" Almost against her will, she feels the acerbic mask of an Agent slip over her features, her face schooled into mild disapproval and one brow ticked up over her teal eyes. Blessedly, Hansel seems not to take offense.

" _Nein_ , not exactly. Only," and here the smile started to emerge in truth, manifesting in a lopsided curve of his lips, "I think I am not the only man on post who would strangle a man in cold blood for a decent batch of brochen, or slaughter a small army for some good schnitzel." And then Hansel proceeds to tell her - eventually shoving his tray and plate aside completely, holding back only the bottle of water for himself - of all the men and women he has spoken with in an effort to better his grasp of English; at first Maria is alarmed, because Marina herself put it best when she said that Hansel was a walking security disaster, but the conversations were all chaperoned by the Grimms themselves, and seemed to encompass mostly the modern landscape and life of Germans. One universally acknowledged fact, by all those soldiers formerly deployed in Deutschland, is a deep and abiding love of German food, from the aforementioned brochen and schnitzel (cultural staples, if Hansel is to be believed) up to slightly more exotic dishes, such as rouladen ("The whole house stinks of mustard, when Gretel makes it!" laughs Hansel) and schinken nudel, and the Holy Grail of German desserts, apfelstrudel.

Maria, fascinated, learns more about German cuisine in that twenty minute lunch than she had ever expected to know in her lifetime; somehow, she is unsurprised to realize, later, that Hansel's healthy appreciation of food is a trait the majority of his sons have inherited, Jason and his taste for Skittles in omelets aside. Given the era that the man himself lived in, when food was a precious commodity and chubby cheeks were a sign of wealth, the very slight obsession with ensuring enough food for the clan as a whole makes perfect sense.

It does not, however, keep Assistant Director Hill from interviewing several soldiers with previous deployments in Germanic territory, speaking with the mess hall cooks, or surreptitiously altering and adding items to the kitchen supply orders. When next Maria sees Hansel in the mess, it is to find that he is delightedly tearing through a plate of fried pork and hard rolls; she cannot help a certain smug sense of accomplishment, seeing the pure, untainted joy on his otherwise careworn face, placed there by her own hand.

She never lays claim to the additions to the menu, of course, and Hansel never asks, but his smile is a little brighter now, whenever he graces her with it.

Lunchtime together becomes something of a regular event; though he is not always there in the mess, when he is, Hansel always takes the same table, off by himself and away from prying ears. Maria always sits across from him, and though the topics range far and wide - food and travel, tactics and tastes, and many spirited discussions on firearms and the use thereof - they adroitly avoid the heavier topics.

(Once, just once, she almost convinces him to part with a story of his past, and as they sit with their palms flat on the table and the tips of their fingers just barely not touching, he stares at his plate with great pain in his face, and opens his mouth to tell the tale - and then there is a clarion clatter of dishes at a table down the way, and Hansel's whole body reacts, all the openness in him rushing out like smoke as his eyes harden and his hands reach for a weapon he no longer carries.

The lunch ends abruptly that day, and Maria, ashamed that her tendency towards interrogation ran away with her, does not pry again.)

It's days later before they regain something of their usual semblance of friendship; the Director summons Hansel to his office, and as Maria is Hansel's erstwhile handler, it is she who must go - though no amount of briefing and preparation can possibly ready her for the sight of Hansel Kuhn, witch hunter and tacit head of the Grimm family, wearing pajama bottoms that hung a little too low on his hips and an AC/DC tee cut a little too high for his taut abdomen. Now _there_ is a picture sure to haunt her dreams for months to come, for Maria Hill is all too aware that sometimes, the merest hint of what lies beneath can be far more enticing than a glimpse of the entire picture.

Hansel notices her looking, she's almost sure, but he holds his tongue and goes to change when Marina comes to her rescue, the other woman pulling her down onto the couch and pressing a drink into her hand. Marina, in such typically mischievous fashion that Maria truly ought to have seen it coming, waits until Hill has a large swallow of alcohol in her mouth before commenting, "So, have you seen him naked yet? Because that can be arranged."

Maria nearly chokes, making a strangled, half-drowned noise in her throat around the liquid, and when she can breathe again, the look she fixes upon Marina's angelic expression could melt laminated glass. "Marina Ivanovna Petrovka," growls Maria, low as an angry wolf and just as deadly serious.

The Russian rolls her eyes, even as she dramatically presses her free hand to her breastbone. "Oh, all three names! I must be in trouble," smirks Marina, taking a pull from her drink between snickers at Maria's expense. "Seriously, Maria. What's the holdup?"

"Are you volunteering Will for voyeuristic preview duty?" ripostes Maria, struggling to maintain her hawkish frown, but the alcohol and Marina's good cheer are entirely too infectious for their own good. Marina snorts into her drink, pokes her forefinger at the chest of Maria's uniform.

" _Misha and I_ aren't sitting in the base mess practically every day, acting like the rest of the world doesn't exist. You know there are three separate office pools going on about you two?" She tosses back the rest of the liquid, then twists in her seat to reach for the decanter on the end table. Maria, steady-handed and unamused, refills both their glasses without so much as a slight hesitation.

"It won't be that way for long," says Maria, quiet and dangerous, drawing her eyebrows down over her teal-blue eyes. Marina smirks and pats her friend sympathetically on the shoulder, relaxing back into the sofa as if they discussed nothing of import, instead of the fact that the entire _base_ seems to be gawping at their Assistant Director and the former witch hunter.

"Oh, let them have their fun, it's harmless. Besides, if you go kicking their asses for it, they'll only move somewhere that I can't hear them gossip, and there goes one of my primary sources of entertainment." She grins and clinks her glass against Maria's; this time she has the decency to wait until Maria has shotgunned her entire tumbler of liquid courage before she speaks. "You didn't answer my question, before. You like him, he likes you, you're both consenting adults." Marina eyes her critically, head tilted to the side, a habit picked up from Clint when he is studying his targets. "Why are you stalling?"   
  
Part of Maria is furious with her friend for her observational skills, so easily divining something that Maria had hoped to keep hidden for a while yet; the rest of her merely despairs at it, for while there are a thousand SHIELD agents who would gladly give their left arms for the skills Petrovka possesses, the woman herself insists on using them for such frivolous things as dissecting Maria Hill's lackluster social life. "For one, there's the fraternization policy," Maria begins, only to have Marina gesture dismissively with her glass.

"You can't use that as an excuse, he isn't part of SHIELD."

"Yet," adds the agent, and Marina nods and gestures for her friend to continue; Hill sighs and rubs at the bridge of her nose with the tips of her fingers, not reluctant, precisely, but she had been hoping that this conversation would be a much longer time in coming than it was, to allow her time to prepare for it. She _wants_ to be angry with Marina, truly angry, because temper has become a suit of armor for Maria to gird herself with and to hide behind - but somehow she is unable to muster the energy for it, and settles for confession instead. "Marina, this isn't exactly _easy_ for me. Every order I give, every choice I make, everything I do is scrutinized and analyzed. I can't afford -" _A relationship with a two hundred year-old German witch hunter,_ she very nearly blurts, but she changes tack at the last second and says something else that is equally true: "I can't afford to be seen making mistakes."

Marina's eyebrows skyrocket towards her hairline. "Is that how you view what happened? As a mistake?"

"No, no, of course not." Maria takes a deep breath, allows her eyes to fall shut just for a moment, seeking clarity within her mind. "But it could easily become one. I have to look at the bigger picture, Marina. This isn't like you and the Colonel, where the only people truly depending on you are the ones who will gladly follow you both to hell and back - too many other people depend on my good judgment, and their trust in that judgment. If I have any hope of doing my job effectively, I can't afford to be selfish," she adds, almost without meaning to.

For a long moment, Marina looks saddened, as though her heart aches for her friend. (There is a part of Maria Hill, the part that is damaged from years of rough handling by the world and defensive almost automatically, that barks ferociously _don't you dare pity me_ , but she twists shut the bars of its cage, chokes off its cries before it can taint their friendship. Maria has only a precious few in her inner circle; she holds no delusions that she can easily weather the loss of Marina Petrovka.) Long heartbeats pass in silence between the two of them, as they nurse their drinks and carefully avoid each other's gazes; eventually Marina mutters, "Well, that got somber pretty quickly," and the sarcastic timbre of her voice brings a smirk to Maria's face at last.

"I am rather maudlin today, aren't I." Maria peers into the bottom of her glass, watching what liquid remains slosh and slide around at the bottom. "What in hell is in this stuff, Marina?"

"Oh, just some engine degreaser, a little toilet bowl cleaner and a shot of Patron. You know, the usual." The says it as deadpan and straight-faced as she can manage, but her lips twitch to betray the intent; Maria, fighting off her own case of the smiles, adds quietly, "Well, that _would_ explain the color," and just like that the moment is over, the pair of them losing their sober miens completely as they giggle like schoolgirls in the rearmost row of class. This is how Hansel finds them when he returns, arm in arm and filling the room with head-turning laughter; both women pin him with solemn gazes that are at odds with their mirthful voices, and when Maria rises to her feet to bid Marina farewell and escort Hansel to Director Fury's office, her heart can't help but feel just a half a shade lighter.

But even as she turns all her attention on Hansel for the brief walk over to Command, intent on preserving in her memory every moment they spend in close company, Maria can't help but wonder what Petrovka has up her sleeves.

Just a little.

xxxxx

"Fraulein Hill, I need to ask hyu a favor," is the first Maria hears from him when she picks up her phone, days after she collected him for his meeting with Director Fury.

"How did you get this number?" She's the first to admit that she is more than a little alarmed at how quickly Hansel adapts to modern technology; if his jaunt across the base impersonating Colonel Grimm hadn't practically given her a stroke, having him call her on a secure line in her own office would have. "How do you even know how to use a phone already?"

"My sons are eager teachers, and I am a swift learner." She can practically hear the subtle smile in his voice, and thinks that she needs to have _yet another_ National Security Talk with Jason, right up until Hansel's tone shifts into seriousness. "My youngest boy, he is sick. I would like to help make him some, ah, comfort food, is the expression? But the commissary on post does not have what we need."

"You want _me_ \- Assistant Director of SHIELD - to take _you_ , Herr Kuhn, off-post to go _shopping._ For groceries."

She can almost hear the reddening of his ears, too. "I.... suppose it does sound rather silly, when hyu put it that way."

Her first instinct is to tell him to ask Marina, or one of his other sons; she opens her mouth to say exactly this when her better judgment kicks in, and she shuts it, thinking. On the one hand, there is the spectre of Director Fury and his thinly-veiled comments about the fraternization policy - but on the other, there is a more recent memory of Marina, all narrow brown eyes and suspicion as she asks, _Why are you stalling?_ The defiance at the heart of who Maria is rejects both of these judgments as insufficient reason either for her to act or to not, but oh, she has ever been one loath to waste an opportunity. Hansel quiet on the line, she spends a moment mulling the circumstances over.

What could it hurt, if Hansel owes her a favor or two? They'll be off-base and away from prying eyes (and gossiping mouths), not to mention that for the nonce, Maria is Hansel's tentative handler at SHIELD. Strengthening their working relationship can only work in her favor. She flicks her eyes to the clock first - midmorning, which would allow them plenty of time for an excursion - and then glances at her blotter, checking her appointments for the day. A clear ledger until the afternoon, and Maria honestly doesn't expect this to take more than an hour or two at the most. "I can pick you up in ten minutes."

It's worth it, for the surprised, almost reverent noise Hansel makes under his breath into the phone. " _Dankeschön,_ Fraulein Hill."

"Don't thank me yet, Herr Kuhn. Be outside and ready to go. Hill out."

He is, unsurprisingly, waiting for her on the curb when she pulls up; he is also, rather _more_ surprisingly, wearing a familiar knee-length leather jacket, the material such a natural fit on his strong frame that if she hadn't seen the duster somewhere else before, she would have assumed it had been tailor-made for him.

"Is that Director Fury's coat?" she says, eyebrow up and tone just shy of accusatory as he legs up into the Humvee as easily and gracefully as if he does so every day of his life.

"That is not the question hyu should be asking me, Fraulein Hill," he returns, bright blue eyes dancing as he buckles himself into the seat - another facet of modern life he has brought with startling quickness into the fold of his knowledge. Maria snorts and throws the Humvee back into gear, steering the wide-set vehicle for the nearest of the base gates.

"And what question _should_ I be asking, then?"

" _Was_ this Director Fury's coat." Hansel laughs, clearly in high cheer, and the pure masculine sound of it spikes pleasurably straight into Maria's bones. She squirms slightly on her seat, suspicious of the betrayal from within her own form, and prays he doesn't notice when she is a half-second too slow on the upshift. "So. Where are we going?"

The question is a much-welcomed distraction, even if she slides her teal eyes sideways to pin him to his seat. "I was hoping you could tell me. If you couldn't find what you needed at the commissary, I doubt it's something we can make a trip to Wal-Mart for." Assuming, of course, that Hansel was even _cleared_ to walk around the local Wal-Mart. She's heard through the grapevine that his first handful of excursions to the commissary and neighboring BX had consisted of him openly gawking at the vast amount of food and merchandise for sale, along with several reassurances from multiple sons that no, all that food would not end up rotting somewhere for the lack of someone to eat it.

Hansel himself, of course, is unaware of her speculations, and one hand on the door handle, he gestures vaguely with the other. "I need a good, thin cut of veal to make Jägerschnitzel. My sons tell me it is much less common now than it was in my time."

"Schnitzel?" says Maria, guiding the Humvee down the streets with absentminded skill. "Don't you use pork to make that?"

"Hyu _can_ ," Hansel allows, "but it is not quite the same. This is a gift for my youngest, Fraulein Hill," he notes, his voice dropping nearly half an octave, as if he imparts a secret of unparalleled importance. "I will not settle for second-best."

_No, I suppose you wouldn't, not when it came to your family,_ thinks Maria, pressing her lips together in thought as she navigates the winding base streets. The MPs don't even flag her down as they pass through the gate; there will be a ruckus returning, of course, because it is much easier to _leave_ a base than to get on post in the first place, but she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it. And as much as she wants to contemplate quiet, calm Hansel - Hansel, who should be watching the scenery as they pass by, and is instead intently studying Maria's every movement as she persuades the military vehicle to perform according to her whims - instead puts her considerable intellect towards the problem of finding fresh veal in the area.

A companionable silence falls over the cab of the Humvee as she drives and Hansel continues to watch her; eventually, she cannot help but comment without looking at him, "Please tell me you aren't planning on hijacking something from the motor pool."

Hansel makes a soft noise under his breath, not quite a chuckle and not quite a scoff. "Mountains of paperwork, _ja?_ "

"You have _no_ idea." The mental image of Hansel at the command of a stolen tank is at once both hilarious and terrifying; Maria files it in her permanent memory, right next to the picture of Director Fury with a truly impressive afro, from back in his earliest days as an agent. "If you want to learn how to drive, for the love of God and Coulson, just _ask._ "

She does not look at him, but she can feel his speculative blue gaze on her face, assessing the sincerity of her offer. "And would hyu teach me, if I asked?" The way he says it is soft and gentle, and with the sense that he is asking a deeper question than the face of it would have her believe; when she risks a glance at him, his cheeks have turned cherry-blossom pink, and Maria knows that Hansel did not mean to say that, or at least in such an obvious manner.

"Sure. Why not." She means for it to be flippant, to add lightness to the sudden expectation in the air, but it falls flat, and she needs must be rescued by the appearance on the horizon of their end destination: a specialty butcher shop on the outskirts of the nearest town, Maria's first and best hope of finding what Hansel needs. He continues to study her face, and she to carefully not meet his eyes, up until she pulls into the lot and ends up double-parking the Humvee, simply on sheer size of the damn vehicle. "Well, here we are," she says unnecessarily ( _Thank you, Assistant Director Obvious,_ she berates herself) but before she can flee from the cab, Hansel grabs her hand by the wrist; it's impulsive and unplanned, she can tell by the slight horrified widening of his eyes as he stares down at his own traitorous fingers, then looks back up at her face, obviously waiting for either the gun or several broken bones to make a sudden, clamorous appearance.

When she doesn't move, only gives him an unimpressed look, one brow up and expecting some sort of followup to this brazen gesture, Hansel bulls forward with it as if such impetuousness was his design all along. "I.... wanted to thank hyu, Fraulein Hill. Hyu didn't have to do this." His cheeks are pink again, but the words are quiet and sincere, a treasure meant for no one but herself. His palm is hot as fire against her skin where he grips her wrist, his fingers searing across her pulse, and though it would be a simple prospect to punish him for his insolence (a reversal of his grip, a hand in his lapels and she would have just enough leverage to break his nose against the dashboard) she finds herself inclined to patience as she has never been before. The heat creeping into her own face is unfamiliar and alien, and she wonders if she is catching a fever until she catches a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror.

She's blushing. Maria Hill, fearsome leadership figure and all-around badass bitch from hell, the Left Hand of God, is _blushing_.

Suddenly the prospect of slamming Hansel's face into the Humvee's dash looks a whole lot more enticing.

"It's nothing," she says instead, tugging her hand free of his callused fingers and opening her door. "Anytime, really. Now, let's get going, unless you don't want to be home in time to cook this stuff for dinner?"

The look on Hansel's face, the soft-edged, crooked smile, seems stunningly intimate in the closeness of the Humvee's cab. But the only comment he makes is a quiet "Yes, ma'am," and they go into the little butcher shop together, their elbows just touching as they move lockstep side by side.

The blush stays all the way back to post, and for most of the rest of the night.


	5. Still Waters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, timeline notations are necessary here - between Ch.32 and 33 of Legacy Protocol, there is a three-year time gap (roughly, from the end of 1996-1999). The next set of chapters in Fairy Tales take place in that three year period, until further notice.
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of rape.

Hansel has stared loss in the face on many an occasion, but he is uncertain how to respond to the kind of emptiness that accompanies not actually having _lost_ anyone. 

Death is a constant companion, in his previous line of work; as a hunter alongside Gretel, he walked hand in hand with the shadow of it every day of his life, has understood from an almost obscenely young age its inner workings, the finality and the closure that it brings, in all its gory detail. Death is a tool, in Hansel's capable hands, and like any tool it is capable of both precision work and brutal effectiveness - it is a threat, a goad, a goal, and very occasionally, a sweet and foolish promise, for those who can only long for such a simple end to their struggles. 

(Once, when he had had his belly ripped open by a monstrous creature on the streets of Belgium, bleeding out his life across the cobblestones while the rain washed the evidence of it away, he welcomed Death like an old friend, and wept later to have it snatched away from him.)

Death is familiar, Hansel learned long ago. Death is _easy_.

It's living that is hard. 

Gretel sleeps; his sons and his _Tochter_ bring her home, and though Hansel was there when they pulled her gurney from that hospital room, the vicious takedown of the brutes guarding her does almost nothing to fill the empty space in Hansel's chest, the place where his desire for vengeance has taken hold, briarthorn woven so tightly around his heart that it hurts to dare to breathe. Two guardsmen too stupid to recognize him are hardly enough to slake his thirst for blood, hardly drops of water in a scarlet sea of hate. Hansel wants to make them all _pay_ , every last one of the sons of bitches that had anything to do with the mistreatment of Gretel, with himself only as an afterthought - but the men responsible, the officers and officials placed highly in the myriad governments that passed the Kuhn siblings amongst themselves like debauched whores, are out of Hansel's reach. His temper cannot be soothed, and justice is nowhere within his grasp. 

But Hansel is a practical man, and he has always believed that it is better to tend the living, for those beyond his help can wait. 

It takes him several visits to Gretel's room before he realizes what, precisely, seems so wrong about her appearance; the nurses have changed her clothing to something more comfortable than the paper gown her captors had clothed her in, and they bathe her limbs and change her sheets as assiduously as if she were a waking patient, but they leave her hair fanned dark across her pillow, for ease of its tending. The women of the medical wing are still terrified of him, the nurses unwilling to lend him their aid, but he has more than enough spare time and effort necessary to procure a hairbrush and what the sales-girl at the BX assures him are elastics _designed_ for hair (such an odd concept). He smuggles the items into Gretel's room in his pockets, as nervous as if he is transporting contraband across a foreign border. 

They were young, when their father left them in the wood, young enough that Hansel feels no shame, then or now, in the caring of his sister's hair; who else did they have, to care for such small things for one another? Patiently, he brushes out her mane with slow, even strokes, and when it lies smooth on the pillow he bends his deft hands to the task of braiding it over her shoulder, loose enough for comfort, but close-bound to appease the warrior in Gretel's soul. The elastics he loops over the ragged ends of her braid, twice with a twist in the middle, as the sales-girl said, and the braid lies thick and dark against the paleness of his sister's skin, the whiteness of her pillow and her sheets. It is a little thing, in the grand scheme of things, so small as to be less than inconsequential.

Yet she seems somewhat more like herself now, hair tended to as if she had done it waking, instead of lying fallow and forlorn under the blinding modern lights. 

It becomes a ritual, when he visits her still shape in her unchanging room in Medical - Hansel brushing out Gretel's hair (it does not grow as he expects it to, but is ever the same as it was, the day they fell to the curse) and braiding it with steady hands, the rustle of her silken hair over his calluses and the snap of the elastics as he twists them into place. When he is done, and _only_ when he is done, does he speak to her of the world and its changes, of the family that awaits her once her sleep is broken; he does not remember if anyone spoke to him, in the endless nightmarish darkness of his own curse, but it eases his heavy heart to think that when she wakes, she will know that he has been there, that he visits her religiously, to remind her that she will never again be alone. 

(It never occurs to him, even as the days bleed into months bleed into years, that she may never wake - that perhaps the man who could break Gretel's curse is already dust in his grave, born and lived and died, all while they slept unaware. 

He suffers through enough despair in his life, in the years to come, that he need not borrow more.)

Hansel takes his greatest delights in telling Gretel about her nephews, five strong young men with hearts like lions, most of them already grown before he even learned of their existence; to her he details the strangenesses and struggles he endures in seeking a filial bond with them, though it is easier with his youngest pair, for Clint and Kenny are sweet, protected, unhardened by the harsh cares of the world. He laughs to tell Gretel of Clint's obsession with his bow, of the contests of skill he and his youngest son regularly engage in at the range - there is a whiteboard with a rainbow of colored markers installed there now, tracking the progress of the weeks as _Falki_ and father jockey back and forth for position, a friendly competition that serves to hone the one upon the whetstone of the other. (Though Clint is without doubt the greatest marksman Hansel has ever seen, the bulk of his skills are at range, with the soft twang of his bow or the sharp report of a long-barreled rifle; they occasionally swap weaponry to keep the scores fair, and Clint with shotgun in hand, brows fret in consternation as he peers downrange at his target, is quite possibly the most comical thing that Hansel has ever seen.)

Kenny, shyer than his brothers, requires a subtler touch. The files on Project Cahill claim that Kenny is substandard, but all Hansel sees is a young man with a gentle disposition and a preference for working with his hands - he likes to keep busy, Hansel observes, likes to have a project to return to in his downtime, something constant, and Hansel gives him a chance at exactly such a project when he asks Kenny to teach him sign language. The young man brightens, every inch of him, when the offer is made, and he wastes no time in sitting Hansel down at the kitchen table and taking him through the alphabet, one painstakingly-formed letter at a time. Language, while a necessity in Hansel's previous line of work, is not exactly one of his strengths; some of the more complicated signs, and the speed necessary to use them with any efficiency whatsoever, do not come easily to Hansel's gnarled hands, but Kenny himself reaches across the table to gently nudge his father's fingers into the correct shapes, never impatient, never frustrated. In this quiet, creeping way, Hansel learns his second-youngest son and his retiring demeanor, the way he shies from conflict despite being bred to thrive in it, the simple, uncomplicated pleasure he derives from pleasing those around him. It both warms Hansel from within and frightens him to the core, to see how eager Kenny is to make him happy. It is all too easy for the old hunter to imagine that there will be others in the future, men and women who will not scruple to use Kenny's kind nature against him. 

He buries the thought, though, and concentrates on Kenny's smile, the way he reflects sunlight like a mirror onto all those around him, how _joyful_ he is the first time Hansel is confident enough in his shaky ASL to sign to Clint in conversation. The successes of Kenny's loved ones are his successes as well; he is a brazen ray of light in an otherwise shadowy world, and Hansel understands his nickname of _solnyshko_ at last - enough that he becomes _Sonnenstrahl_ even in Hansel's own mind. 

(He'll look back later and _treasure_ these days, hold them gathered close to his heart as a balm against harder times; they are already a gift at the time, but the memories transform into something beyond pricelessness, when Kenny leaves them.)

The older trio are more difficult. They are men grown, one and all, somewhat suspicious of Hansel at the outset, an innate caution that Hansel does not blame them for, since they inherited it from him. Gretel would love Brian best, he tells her - he is the most like her, fiery and bold, quick with a quip and swifter still with his temper. Brian approaches Hansel not seeking approval like Clint or Kenny, but to assess him for who and what he represents; he treats him less as his father and more as an equal, a distinction that Hansel finds he does not mind so much, in the end. A day at the range, a few nights in the kitchen with a round of beers (or what passes for beer on post, Hansel's had _water_ with more bite to it) and he and Brian have come to a tacit agreement. Jason, quirky of humor but capable of intense focus, is similarly convinced to allow Hansel into the fold; the middle son is knee-deep in tech practically all the time, and never one to scoff at the latest and greatest tools of the trade, Hansel soon convinces Jason to give him a crash course in the advances of the last few centuries. The incident with Maria's office number was probably a bad idea, and in hindsight Hansel ought to have realized that Jason was up to no good when his grin began to sport teeth in the corners of his mouth, but the damage is already done, and Jason Grimm lives by the phrase 'I'm only in trouble if I get caught'.

Will, the eldest, is the one most like him and, unsurprisingly, the one that takes the longest to allow Hansel a way in. After Hansel leaves a bottle of Bärenfang in the same cabinet where the Colonel usually hides his Glenlivet, however, things become a little easier; more than once, he meets Will in the living room at obscene hours of the night, and though Hansel never asks what brings him there (and, just as importantly, Will doesn't ask either) they sit together on the couch nursing their respective poisons and watching infomercials in comfortable silence, until they can bear the thought of going back to their beds, and the waiting tangle of nightmares there. 

(And if Hansel's bunk is a little colder than the Colonel's, well. He isn't quite ready to discuss the complications represented by either Marina _or_ Fraulein Hill with Gretel's still, silent form.)

Hansel's visits are less cathartic than at first they seem, however; when his visits are complete, and he leaves his sister to the dedicated care of the nurses, his thoughts inevitably turn towards the curse and its consequences. He is the relatively new-minted father of five fine young men, and that is a thing to feel pride for - but the way they came about was despicable in ways that Hansel thought he was long inured to. And perhaps, he thinks scoffingly as he leaves the medical wing, he ought to have expected something of the sort - presented with an immortal man, the basic beginnings of the perfect weapon, better men than he would be tempted to play God with the building blocks of existence. 

He can accept this, in his own mind, even though it infuriates him. What makes him burn with cold rage is the thought of how much _easier_ it would have been for those selfsame men to exploit Gretel. 

What would men of little honor and fewer scruples do, presented an immortal _woman_ , eternally asleep, forever in perfect health and the blush of youthful beauty? Though it makes him grit his teeth in horror to contemplate it, Hansel holds no illusions on that score; for all the advancements of the modern era, the strong still prey upon the weak, the helpless. In Hansel's time, such depredations were the making of a witch. 

In the world he lives in now, he fears that when Gretel wakes, it means she will no longer be the sister he loves, in her place a ravening, mad creature no better than the child-eating monsters she once hunted, tormented by her long imprisonment within her own body, subject to the kind of torture that even his own imagination puts a dead halt upon the conjuring of. 

He can't _possibly_ kill her captors slowly or painfully enough to bring that debt of blood back into true.

Though he usually turns for home after a night of visiting with Gretel (there to sit in his room with the door locked and the lights off, staring at his hands and weighing the gain of his brave sons against the horrors he suffered once and that his sister still endures, a scale that will never find its balance, even in his own heart) tonight his blood roars in his temples and demands release; he turns his feet instead toward the gym, eyes unseeing of all he passes. He is peripherally aware of what agents he passes giving him wide berth, of the pressure of their eyes upon him, but he's far too gone to care that everything he feels shows plainly on his face.

It's late on a weeknight, and while the training hall generally has a handful of agents in it at all hours, what few are present in the gym when he arrives quickly vacate the premises, seeing Hansel storm the mat like a conquering god. He doesn't bother with the lockers, or even a change of clothes - he shrugs off his coat and throws it against the wall, toes off his boots, throws those against the wall, too. The twin impacts of his bootsoles (left then right, _thud THUD_ ) hit hard enough to knock bits of plaster loose from the ceiling. 

He's at the sandbag long enough to be drenched in sweat, his knuckles red and bloody-raw from an endless succession of strikes, before he comes back to himself enough to realize he's no longer alone. 

The sandbag swings forlornly on its ring, and he reaches out with both hands to steady it before he dares to turn around; Maria Hill is seated lotus-style dead center of the sparring ring, bare feet tucked beneath her knees, hands resting palm-up on her thighs and her back ramrod-straight. She looks smaller, somehow, without her uniform to gird her like armor, but the soft grey yoga pants and black tank top mold to her frame no less than her usual mode of attire does, if perhaps slightly more revealing of her upper half; Hansel is guiltily grateful to see the white flesh of her shoulders and arms displayed so openly, where he can commit to memory their lines, the exact tones of her porcelain skin, striped with white scars and pocked in places with old bullet wounds. 

(She is no less beautiful for showing her battle-scars, though - rather the opposite, in fact; he finds her more alluring than ever, seeing the evidence of a warrior's life branded in her skin for eternity.

An impulse from the darker places within his own soul desires to mark that flesh himself, with his teeth if at all possible, and he shoves the notion forcefully away.) 

A ringing silence reins in the training hall for the long moments before she speaks, and when she does her voice is no less calm or commanding for the lack of tension in her frame, for the meditative way in which she opens her teal-blue eyes. "I was beginning to wonder, before tonight," she says, and rises like smoke from the mat, fluid grace executed with nothing but the strength of her legs and an exquisite sense of balance, "where Brian got his temper from. If it was built into him, like so many of his other traits. You're always so composed, Herr Kuhn." She tips her head a few degrees to one side, shifts her weight from one leg to the other, feet braced at shoulder-width and hands open at her sides. "So very in control. You don't _get_ mad."

" _Nein_. I get even instead." He means for the comment to be flippant, but it comes out growled and full of gravel, the point a little too finely-honed and a little too close to the source of his disquiet. He abandons the sandbag, pads for the mat; she moves in response, pacing a slow arc in counterbalance, and they end up walking ellipses around each other, circling like wolves. 

"You don't seem the vindictive type," notes Maria, one brow rising as she studies, calculates, waits patiently for him to act in haste. Her movements are silk over stone, utterly silent; Hansel feels like a raging berserker in comparison, his hands flexing at his sides, aching to take his temper out on something capable of feeling pain.

"I was a punk, in my youth," he responds with a smile entirely too full of teeth to convey any sense of mirth whatsoever. "Hunting witches, killing indiscriminately. Hyu know what witches do to the children they take?" Even that vestige of a smile fades, now, the expression little more than a baring of fang. "They _eat_ them, Fraulein Hill. We'd make light of it, Gretel and I. Laugh, when we found the bones of babies." He scoffs, a sharp exhalation of breath, a condemnation for the young man he used to be. Subjectively, it was maybe eight, nine years since those days; as the calender counts the passage of time, though it has been a lifetime and more. He feels like a different man, these days, even though he knows the truth. "But we _always_ killed the witches, afterward, as slow and painful as possible. I am _full_ of vindictiveness. I'm just better at hiding it now."

Maria stops in her pacing, turns bodily to face him with her chin lifted and shoulders squared, unafraid of his ugliness or the truth of what he is, what he did for a living since his ninth birthday. "Sometimes, all you can do is laugh in the face of terrible things."

"Or what?" He doesn't stop his movements, circles around behind her; he can see that she is unsettled by allowing him access to her unprotected back, even for the two strides it takes him to come back into her peripheral vision, but she does not act, does not strike. Not yet. "Isn't it said that a man who fights monsters becomes one himself?" 

"That's mangling it a bit." Maria snorts and eyes him sidelong, when he reenters her sight. "Who let _you_ read Friedrich Nietzsche?"

"I have very leetle to do these days but read German philosophy, Fraulein Hill." The second smile isn't a nice one either, but less ferocious this time, more of a bitter taste in his mouth. Hansel is used to a life of, well, _use_ , of action and consequence and fighting the things that scuttle in the dark. Idleness chafes at him, goads him into recklessness, but Hansel is long past the point of giving the first damn. He stops his pacing, though, stands in front of Maria, almost uncomfortably close; she does not step back, but neither does he, and his robin's egg eyes bore into her teal ones with the weight of everything he has heretofore left unsaid. "SHIELD could make better use of me, than to let me sit rotting. _Hyu_ could make better use of me." 

Her reaction isn't what he expects: she socks him in the mouth, hard, enough so that he staggers backwards a step with cold fingers pressed to his jawbone, fury igniting in the depths of his eyes. By the time he glares over at her, mouth curled into a snarl and thoroughly incensed, Maria's already taken two steps back and dropped into what looks distinctly like a fighting stance, fists up by her chin, calm and steady and more that ready to weather the storm of Hansel's anger. "You want to be of use to me?" she challenges, collected and in control. "Prove to me that you _can_ be, first."

Neither of them pull their punches after that.

It doesn't take long for the scuffling to go from a boxing match to wrestling on the mat. There's no rules to this little skirmish, no agreed-upon objectives and no predetermined stopping point; Hansel is at the disadvantage, even though he has an inch in height and a good fifty pounds of muscle on the slight Assistant Director, because witch hunters generally don't train in the kind of exotic martial arts that make it an obscenely bad idea to get into close quarters with Maria Hill. The downside to said exotic martial arts, though, is that they rely on crippling moves, killing moves, and Maria isn't truly trying to _break_ him - just wound him a little, as demonstrated when she sits on his upper back facing away from him, one of his arms gripped sure and twisted backwards past his spine, her knees to either side of his ribcage and Hansel sputtering blood into the mat. 

Maria clicks her tongue. "You're going to have to do better than that, Herr Kuhn."

He makes a disgruntled noise in his chest and wriggles his torso and hips, an obvious attempt to get leverage with his knees; she obligingly shifts her weight to pin this new source of resistance, sliding a few inches down towards the base of his spine, and that gives Hansel just enough room to get his free arm underneath himself and _push._ (Hansel is much, much stronger than people tend to give him credit for, legacy of a lifetime throwing around monsters four times his size; his two younger sons will come close one day to matching him, but only after the years have put some more weight on their frames.) The startled squawk Maria makes when he surges up off the mat is priceless, but there's a moment before he throws her off of him where he wonders if she actually _will_ break his arm, but rather than snap his elbow in several places she lets go, rolls across the mat, arms up to protect her head. 

Hansel doesn't let the opportunity pass him by; he pounces, and when the dust clears he's got her pinned on her back, leaned up to shackle her wrists up over her head with his strong hands, and the weight of his frame seated firmly on her midsection. They're both puffing from the exertion (and Hansel is still bleeding from his mouth and nose, a slow, steady _drip-drip-drip_ that trails down his chin and soaks into the front of Maria's black tank) and when she brings up a knee _hard_ into the center of his back, he makes a grunt of pain, but she isn't getting loose anytime soon. 

"Better, Fraulein Hill?" he asks breathlessly, and he feels more than hears her laughing, her torso shivering with the intent of it, the noise itself little more than a shading shudder of breath. 

"Quit grinning at me like that, you crazy bastard." One corner of her mouth has plucked up against her will, and abruptly all of the fight goes out of her frame, the teal-eyed Assistant Director laying calm and pliant on the mat, unconcerned with the blood soaking into her top; Hansel frowns slightly, waiting for the trap to spring, but all he receives instead is a catlike arch of her back and a slight tug where he holds her wrists. "Alright, Herr Kuhn, let me up. You win, this time." 

He rolls off her (with more reluctance than he would like to admit; the image of pinning Maria to the mat is going to haunt him for weeks to come, Hansel is sure) and they sit companionably on the floor while they inventory their injuries, the staccato of their racing heartbeats slowly lowering and breaths evening out into normal range. Hansel's paid for his victory - he'll be covered in bruises tomorrow, and wincing exploration of his face reveals that while his nose isn't broken, he might have some dental work in his near future - but he counts it well worth the price, Maria wiping spatters of his blood off of her face with the inside of one forearm. She'll have a few purple badges of honor herself, but all of _hers_ will be hidden beneath her uniform. 

(Hansel is quietly thrilled by the idea that no one will know about her marks except the two of them.)

"You feel better?" she asks, gesturing in his direction before she palpates her knee, checking to make sure she didn't crack anything on his stubborn back. He frowns and opens his mouth to ask the question of _about what_ before he shuts his teeth on his own words; the lava-hot rage he felt over Gretel's mistreatment, let so long to simmer and having finally boiled over, is almost entirely gone, washed away in the rush of adrenaline brought on by their short, but brutal, match in the training hall. 

He's covered in sweat, bleeding profusely and going to be sore as all hell in the morning, yet Hansel feels cleaner in this moment than he has for a long, long time. 

" _Ja._ I do." He can't keep the surprise out of his voice, and Maria eyes him sidelong again, palms flat to the floor behind her and propped up on her arms. 

"You scared the ever-loving _shit_ out of my agents," she notes with an arched eyebrow, but the chiding is relatively mild, compared to the punishment they've only recently dealt out to each other. "At least two of them thought you were in immediate danger of a homicidal rampage across base." Hansel makes himself look apologetic, even though there isn't a sorry bone in his body for this incident. Maria, of course, sees right through him and smacks him open-handed on the shoulder, using the motion for enough momentum to roll lightly to her feet. "You want to talk about it before you start spraying people with a semi-automatic weapon?" 

"It is about Gretel," and the words are out of his mouth before he realizes he's saying them; they just slip out and he's unable to bite them back, grimacing somewhat at his lack of self control. Maria, however, only makes an understanding moue, and Hansel pulls himself up off the mat, rubs his chin and mouth on the sleeve of his (now thoroughly ruined) shirt to give himself a moment to think. "I was thinking...." He sighs, scrubs his hands at his scalp like that will get his brain to cooperate with him. "All those decades we were asleep, and only recently did hyur science catch up enough to make my sons. How much _easier_ would it have been, to...." He can't even get the word out, but he sees from the look on Maria's face, how she is simultaneously sympathetic and rigid all over with highly-controlled anger. In an instant, she transforms from Maria into the Assistant Director, a palpable difference in her demeanor; she is a warrior, through and through, and he thinks to himself that he should have discussed this with her earlier, would have found an ally in this that much sooner. 

"I see," she says quietly, the figurative gears spinning behind her teal gaze. "I can understand why you would be upset. If it helps, the physical we gave her when we brought her home didn't find any evidence of foul play." She doesn't need to say, however, that such _foul play_ could have occured months or years, even centuries ago; it would have long healed, and not necessarily scarred flesh that is for all intents and purposes immortal. Hansel is used to expecting the worst. "We're still tracing her medical records past the turn of the century, last I heard, but if we locate any anomalies, you'll be the first to know." 

"Thank hyu, Fraulein Hill. Hyu have no idea what that means to hear." Hansel tips his head forward in gratitude, spares a moment to rub at his eyes. Neither of them mention what Hansel fears just as deeply, that somewhere out in the world there is a child, or children, born of Gretel that she was never even peripherally involved in the creation of; after all, if the American government can create five young boys so tailor-made for their roles in the world, who was to say that Project Cahill was even the first such attempt? 

He doesn't hear her pad over to him, is startled by her touch at his shoulder, considerably gentler this time; when his eyes flutter open, he is surprised to see how close she stands to him, how genuine the sympathy on her strong features. "Stop _thinking_ , Hansel," Maria advises, her teal eyes steady mere inches from his. It seems for a moment like she might say more, but then she pats his shoulder again and steps away, moving for the edge of the mat where her shoes are neatly lined up by the rubber. "Get cleaned up and go home. Spend some time with your family. You've trusted SHIELD to care for Gretel so far, let us work on this for a little bit before you go putting holes in my walls, will you?"

She's gesturing for one of the walls of the gym as she says this, stepping into her shoes, and Hansel feels his ears heat when he notices that there's a perfect imprint of one of the soles of his boots in the drywall. "Ah. My apologies."

Maria waves it off. "Not the first hole we've had to patch. I'll have some poor Level One on my shit list out here with some spackle in the morning." The blase way in which she says it makes him chuckle unexpectedly, and she has the faintest hint of a smile on her face when she lifts her hand in farewell. "Don't stay up too late with Will - you've got a skills assessment in the morning."

"I do?" he blinks; Maria rolls her eyes at him over her shoulder before she turns to pad for the door. 

"You do if you want to be cleared for field work. Goodnight, Herr Kuhn."

The door opens and shuts on her slender figure, and she's long gone before Hansel realizes that she called him by his first name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> German Translations:  
> Ja/Nein - Yes/No  
> Tochter - Daughter  
> Falki - Little hawk  
> Sonnenstrahl - Sunbeam  
> Bärenfang - A type of German honey liquer, based off of vodka; lit. "Bear trap"
> 
> Russian Translation:  
> Solnyshko - Sunshine


	6. A Briefing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, guys. Here, have some plot! 
> 
> No German translation notes this time - most of it is cross-referenced in Legacy Protocol or explained in the body of the text.

SHIELD is, as you might expect, very thorough when it comes to documenting their assets. 

Despite how easily Maria drops the news, a skills assessment by SHIELD standards is not merely a morning of PT, or even merely _several_ mornings of PT - it is instead an involved two-week process of what-if scenarios, with few breaks in between, whereupon the candidate in question is graded on everything from how quickly they tie their shoes to how efficiently they can clear out a room full of hostiles. Though other agents might claim that the tests are designed to cull the weak (and quite a few potential agents quit without completing their assessment, grumbling about the nigh-impossible degree of difficulty) Maria Hill, Assistant Director of SHIELD, knows the truth: the tests aren't _designed_ to be beaten. They're designed to push a candidate to the brink of collapse and then over it - to ascertain the limits of their stamina and mental toughness, to ferret out weaknesses and define strengths, to pinpoint precisely when an otherwise exemplary soldier might well break down into tears and start crying for his mama. It's better to do this in the early stages of an agent's vetting, to make them into a known quantity, lines and charts and graphs on printer-paper and locked deep in secure hard drives. If you're going to send someone into a highly unusual, often extremely dangerous situation without knowing how they're going to react to any given stimuli, then, well. Why send them at all?

In the end, what all the effort boils down to is a single manila file, four sheets of hardcopy tucked inside, printed both front and back.

Maria is not surprised at all to read that Hansel has passed his assessment with flying colors. 

She sees shades of his five sons in the reports, recognizes the source of their particular talents without having to look particularly hard at the sheets of paper; Hansel has exemplary scores in mental quickness and fortitude, discipline any Marine would envy, an almost boringly reliable set of steady hands, horselike stamina and a pleasantly surprising propensity for scavenging from the environment just about anything he needs to accomplish his objectives. He is efficient, quick to learn from what few mistakes he makes, and does not hesitate to use violence where warranted - perhaps rather moreso, actually, than the average recruit might be. (The notes in the file indicate that in one particular exercise, Hansel had rounded a corner while 'infiltrating' a building and been startled by one of the agents portraying the 'enemy' - whereupon Hansel had promptly punched the unlucky man in the throat to keep him from raising the alarm, following up with a broken nose and a truly spectacular black eye. If the scenario notations are anything to go by, Maria would have a lot of letters to be writing to the man's family right about now, had Hansel not remembered at the last possible second that it was a training exercise.)

The Flexibility/Adaptability score is off the chart, as Maria expects - his affinity for technology more modern than the average firearm, however, just barely passes muster, also as Maria expects. Apparently there had been An Incident where the officer on duty had attempted to ascertain Hansel's combat driving skills, without actually checking beforehand to see if Hansel possessed _driving_ skills in the first place; that part of the report is a short, curt paragraph advising that Hansel Kuhn never be allowed behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, _ever_.

 _Well,_ Maria muses, idly tapping her pen against the file as she reads, _with Jason banned from the base kitchens, I see no reason not to ban his father from the motor pool._

(At least until he follows through on his unspoken promise to ask for lessons from Maria, though she hastily shoves the thought away.)

Even with the clear, unbiased evidence of his skills sitting right there in front of her, though, she is still reluctant to open the other file that sits on her desk - the dark grey one, the one marked LEVEL 3 in bright red stamped across the thick paper's clearance indicator, the scarlet ink smeared like blood where the agent in question had handled it before it had been allowed to dry. Given the contents of the file, Maria understands the haste to see it upon her desk, but sharply disapproves of the sloppiness such haste has resulted in; she likes things tidy and neat, especially when it comes to her job - missions cleanly executed, while boring, are efficient and simple, or at least as simple as such outrageousness as SHIELD deals with day to day can be. No mess to clean up afterward. No awkward explanations. No loose ends. 

Hansel Kuhn, unfortunately, is rapidly becoming a loose end, a thread she can't seem to resist tugging on, even though she knows that one day, everything will all come unraveled because of it. Best to cut that thread before disaster can happen, she knows - best to clip it short and burn the ends, and never look back. 

She drums her fingers on the desk, flicking her teal gaze back and forth between the assessment file and the Level 3. 

A _smart_ agent would flip the first file closed, throw the second file into a locked cabinet, and forget that the two had ever crossed paths in such a fashion, handling each quietly, but separately; a rather more careful (and paranoid) agent would lock them both up, ascertain that all the digital copies have been erased, and _then_ throw both of the damn things into the industrial-grade shredder Maria keeps beneath her desk before handling the situations presented, also separately. Fury wouldn't need to take such precautions, she's sure, for there does not exist the SHIELD agent who has decided that rifling through the Director's desk, in itself a jungle of swaying stacks of paper and old Chinese food cartons, is worth the drop in pay grade and possible tetanus shot. But all of these options are _safe_ ones, because they excise the man from the information - information that, Maria judges, he desperately needs in order to be able to sleep at night.

Coulson would lay the two files down in front of the man whom they concern, and offer him a choice. 

Marishka, bless her soul, wouldn't bother even with that. 

Maria Hill, drumming her fingers on the desk again, stares at the files and contemplates what _she_ would do, and if that choice would be any different, if it did not hold the potential of wounding Hansel Kuhn so deeply that his already heavy heart might finally die from it. 

xxxxx

"Hyu asked for me?"

Hansel is there precisely at the requested hour, of course, his brows pinched into a frown and expression mildly wary - it is unlike her to call him to her place of work, as he well knows, but the contents of the Level 3 folder deserve circumspection, and this news, she thinks, is best delivered on neutral territory. To such end, she has commandeered a room at the far end of a little-used hall (as much for privacy as for a lack of witnesses and potential property damage, should Hansel go completely and utterly berserk) with smooth white walls and a smoother black oval of a conference table. Every detail of the scene is orchestrated with utmost care, from the height of their chairs (precisely equal) to her pose (legs together and crossed at the ankles, her forearms on the table and her fingers laced together, corset tight) to the folders that sit in front of her, the manila to her left, the grey one marked Level 3 equidistant to her right. Perhaps it is overpreparedness; perhaps Maria Hill is a little too much of a Girl Scout in that respect (and she was once, a long time and another life ago) but taking care of the details makes her feel as if she has a measure of control over that which is uncontrollable. 

(She has time for that girlish part of her, the part that regards Hansel Kuhn less as a company asset and more as a man, to wonder briefly if perhaps she should have taken care to alter her default appearance - stone-faced and severe, hair in its accustomed bun and her uniform zipped up as far as it will go, shoulders tight, her entire essence combative, defiant. She violently quashes such frivolous thoughts before they can nudge her mind off-track.)

"Right on time, Herr Kuhn," she says, and instead of looking up at him, reaches for the manila folder. She spins it in place, stops it with deft fingers once it has made the required one-eighty, flips open the cover to reveal the cramped rows of text within; Hansel's own disgruntled photograph stares out at him, an island of color in the torrid sea of black and white. "As you can see, I have the results of your assessment right here. Please, have a seat. We have some important topics to discuss."

Hansel has paused in the doorway with one forearm braced on the jamb, watching Maria with incredible focus; she senses less than sees him taking in the room, its carefully constructed neutrality and her equally careful language, so very professional, giving not so much as a hint of the kind of tentative relationship they have off the clock. He enters the lion's den, in answering her call, and she can almost _feel_ it ticking over in his brain, the hunter's innate distrust at anything that so much as vaguely resembles a trap. For a moment, she wonders if that highly-trained instinct of his will send him backwards out of the room, a tactical retreat designed to allow him to approach this unexpected hurdle at an angle of his own choosing - but Maria has underestimated Hansel, either his courage to face her or his trust in her judgment, and he sits slowly down in the office chair across from her with unease in his body language and suspicion in the fret of his brows. 

"What kind of 'important topics'?" he echoes, and when she risks an upward glance at his face, he is not perusing the assessment, hasn't even given it a cursory flicker - instead his robin's-egg eyes are burning in his face and locked onto hers, demanding answers to questions as yet framed only by silence. She stiffens her back, lifts her chin, pushes the manila file toward Hansel's side of the conference table; Maria can stare down Nick Fury in the worst of his moods, making rising to an old German witch hunter's challenge child's play. 

"At current, you are only tangentially attached to and employed by SHIELD," notes Maria, retracting her hands to weave her fingers together before her once again. "If I might speak frankly, the _Brat'ya Mrachnyy,_ as a tactical unit for the US military, consists of only four of your sons - your son, Brian, and you yourself, Herr Kuhn, are not listed among their number."

" _Ja,_ and?" he prompts curtly, one brow rising slightly. Hansel is patient enough on the hunt, Maria has observed, a well of calm vigilance once actually engaged in the act of _doing_ something, but suffers rather more from the 'hurry up and wait' policies required to get there in the first place. (A childish part of her wants to draw this out, if only to make him squirm; it would serve him right, for that damned _Sprechen sie Deutsch_ crack all those months ago.)

In the end, though, she decides that brevity is the soul of wit, tilting her head to study his face, making her own features as blank as if they were carved from stone. "I have here in this folder," and here she reaches out to place her palm over the Level 3, her fingers obscuring much of the scarlet lettering, "the proposal for an operation to secure, explore and document a previously unknown medical facility in remote Austria, dating back to the late eighteen hundreds and still in use up through nineteen forties." No reaction from the decidedly unimpressed Kuhn, though Maria can believe that a man who had been comatose for the entirety of both World Wars may not place much weight upon the significance of those years. Time to raise the stakes. "We discovered this facility by tracing the movement records of one particular asset belonging to the German government - one Gretel Kuhn."

Ah, there it is, the flash in his blue eyes like lightning snaking across a storm-grey sky. Maria sees now why his sons call him _Volk_ \- The Wolf - for his entire demeanor changes as if he has caught the scent of prey; the mild hostility, erected as a barrier between him and whatever trap Maria has laid, vanishes like smoke, and his gaze darts to the file pinned closed by her hand, hungry for the knowledge, calculating in seconds what actions and sacrifices might be necessary to attain it. There is blood in the air and on the snow, and Hansel wants to lap at it just as much as he wants to shed it.

He's taken the bait. Now, to set the hook. 

"I did promise you," says Maria mildly, watching him carefully as she executes this next move in the chess game that is their odd relationship, "that I would report any anomalies in Gretel's records to you. I do not intend to break that promise. However," and here she taps the scarlet 3 on the dark grey folder with the callused pad of one finger, "it could be weeks before the site is documented thoroughly enough to have a complete report compiled. Months, before that information can be declassified enough to be allowed into the hands of an outsider." His eyes flick back to her own, a bright hungry blue meeting dead-level teal. "Of course, if you were a SHIELD agent in _practice_ as well as in name, I might tell you that there is a vacant place on one of the strike teams assigned to this operation. I might even be able to have you on that plane to Austria, to see the location in person." She leans back in her chair, folds her hands together in her lap. "You want to be of use to us, Herr Kuhn? This is your chance."

To Hansel's credit, he does not move, does _not_ immediately pounce upon the file as she half-expects him to, though his eyes stray briefly to it before returning back to Maria's face. "What exactly do hyu want from me, Fraulein Hill?" he says, powder-soft, eyes narrowed slightly as he navigates the winding maze of recent events. 

"In all honesty?" she says, lifting her brows over her steady teal gaze. "SHIELD was given a unique opportunity when we brought you home, but it's one that I feel hasn't been explored to its full potential. You're cleared up to Eyes Only simply by existing - and through Level Five at SHIELD by extension - but you spend your days harassing my agents and wandering aimlessly across my base, causing all manner of trouble." Her face is stern, but she can't help the sprinkling of reluctant amusement that glitters in her eyes, nor the answering shine in Hansel's own. "Frankly, Herr Kuhn, if I'm going to be cleaning up your messes, I'd rather they be SHIELD-sanctioned ones. Those tend to involve fewer explosions."

"That was an _accident_ ," notes Hansel in low tones that would be defensive if not for the sharp edge the words carry. It makes the corners of Maria's mouth turn upward, almost against her will. 

"This operation I have presented you with is probably, in reality, much closer to Level Two than Three. It's labeled that way because the facility itself has the earmarks of HYDRA involvement." Another blank look from Hansel, and Maria makes a mental note to handpick the agents for this particular mission with extreme care, to minimize the chances of friction; a German hunter that can only be described as 'old school' being thrust into a former Nazi site of operations has the potential for disaster written all over it. "You really need to read your modern history packet in full," she asides, before continuing onward as if the exasperated sentence had never been said. "Suffice it to say that indications are, that while the facility itself hasn't been active in decades, there may be artifacts and information from the era remaining on site. Certain government agencies are going to be _extremely_ interested in what comes out of that facility."

A thin vertical wrinkle appears between Hansel's brows, and he finally reaches for the grey folder to peruse the contents; satellite imagery, stills taken from the surrounding mountains, panoramic flyovers from drones, little more than cameras on wings. The facility itself is an unassuming brown building nestled in the mountains and shaped like a capital L, two wings intersecting at a central compound, all of it blanketed in heavy snow and giving every appearance of having been derelict for much of the last century. He's spreading the glossy-surfaced photos out across the table when he speaks again, pausing the movement of his hands only to hover briefly over new material, such as a set of blueprints tentatively identified as a floor plan of the facility. "Why would so many others be interested?" he wonders beneath his breath, frowning at the file.

This is the part that Maria has been dreading, and her gut clenches even as she continues, committed now to the end result. "Are you familiar with the super-soldier experiments of World War Two, such as Project Rebirth?" 

"A leetle. There were some pages on it, in the Cahill files. Nothing detailed. What does that have to do with.... ?" The sentence dies in his mouth when Hansel looks up at her, takes in her grave expression with wary sobriety, as if he is not sure if he wants to know what awaits him at the end of this line of questioning. "What aren't hyu telling me?"

"We have reason to believe," Maria says, quietly and calmly, "that the serum derived from those experiments were based at least partially on blood samples from what today's science calls a Subject Zero." She lifts her hand, gestures for the file splayed out beneath Hansel's strong fingers, but never once does she dare to break his gaze. "Back then, they called her _Dornröschen_. I believe the English translates roughly to Sleeping Beauty."

All the color drains from Hansel's face, every last drop of blood vacating his features, making his bright blue eyes seem even brighter for the lack of contrast; his hands fall to grip the edge of the conference table, and for a moment Maria contemplates pushing away from it with her feet, that she isn't pinned beneath the weight of the damn thing when he flips it in his anger - but though the intent is written there in the lines of his frame, he never completes the motion, in fact is careful to pry his hands one finger at a time away from the wood, to knot them in his lap, where the only thing he can damage is himself. 

(Maria does not fail to note, however, that the pressure of his hands has left eight oval-shaped dimples, marring the otherwise perfect surface of the wooden table.)

"Vhat do hyu vant from me, Fraulein Hill?" he asks again, his accent much thicker now in his distress, though perhaps that is not the correct word to describe him with; his face is alternating back and forth between the blanched white of shock and the scarlet flush of fury, his blue eyes _burning_ as if lit from within by hellfire, while the rest of him as as cold and still as ice. 

Maria leans forward over the table, pulls on her mask as the Assistant Director just for a moment, speaking in hushed tones across the gap between them, harsh and quick, like a knife to the gut. "I want you on that plane as much as you want to _be_ on that plane, Herr Kuhn," she says, staring straight into his furious gaze without flinching. "But this is a SHIELD operation, and it will be conducted my way, on my terms. You will be under my command, and you will listen to my orders, no matter if you might not like how they sound. By accepting this mission, you accept my authority as an agent of SHIELD. At current, Colonel Grimm has the right to tap you for his operations - after this operation, you come under my jurisdiction, and he will no longer be able to do so without my prior agreement." She scoffs softly, manages a bleak grimace that might, on a less sharp-featured face, pass for a smile. "The _Brat'ya Mrachnyy_ will just have to learn to live without you."

She expects fury and resistance to the concept; she is not prepared for amusement to appear amidst his show of temper, gleaming in his blue eyes, or for the twitching at the corners of his mouth that passes for a smile on his handsome face. "Hyu are stealing me from _mein Adler_? Fraulein Hill, if hyu vanted me that badly, hyu had only to ask." He moves one of his booted feet forward to tap her on the ankle when he says it, and she can't help the sudden leap of color to her face, or the decidedly unprofessional direction that her thoughts suddenly take; from the way Hansel's ears turn pink, and the way he stares steadily back at her as if he almost wishes she would defy him, she doesn't think the double entendre was entirely intentional.

"That seems to be a running theme here, doesn't it?" she notes quietly, tapping her fingers against the tabletop. "Asking for things." 

They stare at each other for a handful of long moments, measuring the time out in heartbeats, before Maria shifts her gaze back down to the documents scattered between them; but she separates her feet, moves her left one to rest with the outer edge of her foot against the inside of Hansel's ankle. His ears turn even redder, she glimpses as she pretends to straighten up his haphazard sprinkling of papers, but neither of them dare to say a word about it. 

"I agree to hyur terms," Hansel says softly after a moment, lifting his head to meet her gaze. "My sons may not be happy with me for it, but.... I cannot wait for the report, afterward." He sets his jaw, lifts his chin a fraction. "So. What happens now?"

Maria watches him for a moment, to be sure that he is certain of his decision; his back is firm, his shoulders set, his mouth a grim white line in the rugged features of his familiar face. She's judged him right, that he is willing to do damn near anything for his loved ones - and that while his sons are autonomous in their own rights and hardly need Hansel's help, Gretel is his weakness, the crack in Hansel's armor. Through her, Maria can get Hansel to do damn near anything she wants, if she applies the correct pressure in the correct circumstances. It's a spy's wet-dream, holding that level of control over the head of someone as innately dangerous as Hansel Kuhn.

(Why, then, does the thought of it make Maria's stomach twist in disgust, horrified at herself even over this relatively mild form of manipulation?)

"What happens now," she says, instead of the apology that is trying to force its way out through her lips, "is that you pack your gear and I see you at oh-four hundred on the tarmac. Expect to be gone for three to five days, in a mountainous, possibly subzero climate. Pack accordingly." There's a moment when neither of them move, and then she taps his ankle with her own foot, provoking in him a lopsided smile, as if he has half-forgotten the motion required for the expression; he eases up out of his chair and snaps off a salute that would have made Will burst out laughing, simply because of how _wrong_ it looks on Hansel, despite how crisply it is executed. 

"Fraulein Hill." His eyes are glittering when he says it, and Maria rolls her own gaze with an exasperated sigh, lifts her hands to make a shooing motion with her fingers. 

"Dismissed, soldier," she says, and Hansel leaves the files scattered across the table in favor of turning to leave, stepping with surprising quietness for a man his size, wearing leather boots. Maria watches him go, her hands gathering the photographs and papers back into their separate files, and wonders (not for the first or last time) if she has made the right decision; she's not quite sure what emotion compels her to reach for her phone, but once Hansel is long gone she pulls it from her pockets and dials, trying to suppress the queasiness roiling in her belly, like bad sushi gone on the rampage in her stomach. 

When the receiver picks up, she says only, "Send me Colonel Grimm," and clicks her phone shut. 

xxxxx

William is furious, of course. 

It's not the homicidal, sociopathic rage of Brian, though, or Jason's silent treatment, or Clint's sulking or even Kenny's simple sweep of temper, there and gone again when he no longer needs it. Colonel Grimm sits in the seat vacated scarcely an hour earlier by his father, the contents of the grey file arrayed in neat rows across the conference table, and his face looks as calm and flinty as ever, his expression and the language of his frame giving away nothing. They could be discussing the mess hall dinner schedule, for all an outsider would know. 

It's the eyes that tip his hand: they've settled on a molten silver, his pupils shrunk to pinpricks, and if looks could kill Maria would not only be incinerated, but buried in the deepest, blackest, most miserable hellhole in existence. 

(Maria's actually kind of impressed. But she's seen worse.)

"Give me one reason," says the Colonel, and well now, Maria never expected to hear that low tone he used to rip the rangemaster a new asshole turned on _her_ , "why I shouldn't just go to my father right now and tell him what you've done." 

"What I've _done?_ " She arches her eyebrows, folds her hands before her on the countertop. "Before I answer that, Colonel, perhaps you ought to tell me what it is, precisely, that you think I've done. Aside from poach Herr Kuhn from the _Brat'ya Mrachnyy_ , that is." 

A crack in the facade; a muscle in his cheek twitches, and though William Grimm is the epitome of stone cold fury, Maria is suddenly quite sure that the same capacity for violence that Hansel and Brian use to such great effect lies within the eldest Grimm's frame as well. As Hansel puts it, he just hides it better. "This isn't about you poaching my father for SHIELD. This is about you _manipulating_ him to get him where SHIELD wants him, not where it's necessarily best for him to be." William leans forward very subtly, and Maria can see that though there's very little overt tension in the Colonel's upper half, there is still a vein in the side of his neck that his pulsing so strongly it seems fit to burst. "I know what you're doing, Maria. Using Aunt Gretel to get at him is only going to come back to burn the both of you, and quite frankly, I don't think you know what kind of fire it is you're playing with." 

"So, I should have just kept this information from him?" She gestures with the blade of one hand at the assembled files, marching in tidy lines across the conference table. "Given you the file to look at, what, six months, a year down the line?" Maria sets her jaw, looks William directly in the eye, and finds that staring Hansel in the face was, somehow, much harder. "I think that would have hurt him more in the long run, don't you?"

"I'm not sure you're considering the long run at all, Agent Hill." The abrupt shift in address, from personal to formal, is like a slap in the face. Maria leans back in her chair, presses forefinger and thumb to the inner corners of her eyes; the Colonel, stewing in his fury, is kind enough at least to allow her a second to gather her thoughts so that she can explain herself. 

"Will, look. Has he spoken to you about Gretel, since we extracted her?" When Maria drops her hand, she doesn't look back at Will, instead picks a bit of wall off to his left to stare at; she sees him shake his head slightly in her peripheral vision, the Colonel wondering what she's getting at. "Herr Kuhn - Hansel - fears the worst when it came to Gretel's captivity. And when I say the worst, I do mean the very _worst._ It's eating holes in him thinking about it, and he's not like you, he's not _designed_ to be resilient to that kind of thing. He put a hole in the wall of my training hall, for God's sake. I had to stop the MPs from arresting him for scaring the crap out of my agents." She lifts her hand again to rub at the spot of tension over her left eyebrow, where she can already feel the migraine beginning to bloom. "My point is, I swore to him that if we found any anomalies in her records that he would be the first to know. Then this arises," another flap of her hand for the file, "and here I am, caught between a rock in the Austrian mountains, and your father, the hard case. Anything with HYDRA's name on it is nothing to sniff at, Will, you know that. I can't just bring in an outsider on something that will be so heavily scrutinized."

"But at the same time," sighs Will, "it's unethical to keep it from him. Yes, I get your thought processes, Maria." When she risks a look at his expression, some of the fury has faded, and his eyes have shaded subtly into a greenish blue, like moss growning over slate. "That doesn't mean I agree with how you went about it, though. Far from it." 

"If you give me the shovel talk," warns Maria, one brow arched, "I should tell you, Marishka already beat you to the punch."

"I'm not going to give you the shovel talk." Will leans forward the slightest bit again, eyes angling more blue than green now, cold, clean, practical. "I'm going to tell you the truth. My father does not trust easily - call it a relic of how he was raised, if you have to call it anything at all. But once you betray that trust, there's no getting it back. Now, I understand your motives for acting the way you did, _this_ time." His eyes have slid to grey again as he says this, colourless this time but still cold, the colorless scales of a fish held up to the light. "But God help you if there's ever a next time, because it won't be me or my brothers, or even Marishka, that you have to answer to." 

He lets that hang in the air for a few moments, and Maria does not need him to elaborate on the unspoken conclusion; she doesn't want to dwell on the spectre of Hansel's bitter disappointment any longer than is necessary. "You've made your position very clear." Maria gestures with a hand, lifts her chin a bit. "Are you satisfied?" 

Will snorts inelegantly. "Hardly. I'm only hoping it will never become necessary to clean up the wreckage of if you ever burn this whole thing down." He rises from the table, and the motion is so reminiscent of Hansel, so unconsciously echoing his forebear, that it pangs in Maria's chest. She's been so long in the business, in SHIELD, that she'd thought she had lost the ability to feel guilt; clearly, that is not the case, because when Will comes to his feet and gathers the papers, she feels an urge to speak that she cannot deny. 

"All I want," she says, before she can try to prevent the words from leaving her tongue, "is to do what's best for everyone involved." 

The Colonel looks at her sadly, almost pityingly, before he taps the sheaf of papers into true on the tabletop, places them neatly back in their folder and straightens. "Harder than it sounds, isn't it." 

He leaves her like that, staring at the pair of folders on the countertop, much the same as when she began, and the burden of her heart just as heavy.


	7. Dornröschen: Maria

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So due to a badly-timed power outage, I lost nearly 4 hours of work on this chapter and had to start from scratch. :/ Sorry for the delay this caused.
> 
> Graphic description of gore in this chapter, though it's brief.

Strangely enough, what Maria remembers most vividly afterward (and they _will_ ask her, over and over again, in the vain, vague hopes that she will be able to fill in some of the gaps in their records) is the plane ride over. 

They take a Quinjet across the Atlantic, only one, but that one is crammed to capacity with gear; boxes of equipment are stashed under seats and in the overheads, strapped to the metal floor and hanging from the ceiling on carabiners. Personnel are similarly stuffed in wherever room can be found, soldiers and scientists sitting hip to hip with documentors and surveyors. The crew assembled for the run on the facility is mostly comprised of non-field agents, and Maria has no trouble picking out the wolves amongst the sheep - the veteran troopers are already catnapping in their seats, heads tipped back and arms folded beneath their six-point harnesses, knowing the value of arriving well-rested, the inherent exhaustion of being trapped in a flying tin can for eight hours at a stretch. It's a quiet flight, interrupted only by the occasional bit of turbulence or smattering of conversation; the agents know that the presence of three separate strike teams amongst them means that at the end of the line, AD Hill expects trouble, and the atmosphere is a tense one because of it. 

Maria herself is seated amidst a row of agents and soldiers at the aft of the 'jet (no preferential treatment here; the brass must suffer the same indignities as the infantry, if Maria has anything to say about it) mission outline in hand, restlessly leafing through the sheaf of papers, cycling them from back to front, over and over. It's nothing she doesn't know already - personnel listing, equipment manifest, updated floor plans of the facility and angles of attack and expected obstacles to securing the objective, of which there are very few - and while Maria has memorized all of this long before the plane shuffled itself into the air, it behooves her to appear calm, ready, prepared. She sees the sidelong glances the agents send her every so often, taking their cues from her behavior, and even when the 'jet shudders hard from side to side from turbulence at altitude, throwing people against their harnesses and rattling the crates, she makes herself seem entirely unruffled, as if even this is expected, is going according to plan. 

She's never sure if it's worth the effort, if her outward stoicism makes the difference in morale that protocol purports it to, but there's no reason _not_ to appear as if the world is dancing to her every whim.

Unfortunately, such a proposition is made more difficult by the fact that SPC Hansel Kuhn, Echo Five of Strike Team Echo, sits at her right hip, her thigh so flush with his that she can pick out by sense of touch every individual wrinkle of the leg-pocket sewn into his BDUs, even through the layers of her own winter-weather uniform.

Marishka will give her a disbelieving look for it later, but Maria honestly did not plan for the chips to fall in such a manner; she had been the first on the Quinjet, overseeing the loading first of supplies and then of people, directing agents to sit where there was room and, yes, perhaps overloading the jet the tiniest bit, though the damn thing would still fly, of course, and would have if she'd loaded a herd of elephants on board. When all of her required personnel were strapped in - which had required some delicate maneuvering and not a little MacGuyvering of the black harness-webbing - the last seat available had been next to Hansel. 

Maria chooses to believe that Hansel being an unknown entity - not to mention his uncanny resemblance to the Colonel - is responsible for such an occurrence, and not his forbidding stare, the witch hunter perhaps maneuvering events into his favor on the sheer power of his blue-eyed gaze. 

They lock gazes only once, two hours into the flight when Maria sets the papers down in her lap, to stretch her arms out in front of her, rolling her head to rest on her own left shoulder in a futile attempt to work some of the stiffness out of her muscles. A more proper motion would be obnoxious to those seated to either side of her, but her joints are aching for motion, motion she has to deny them by necessity; the small moue of frustration that slips out from under her breath, however, turns Hansel's face towards her, and when his so-very-blue eyes snap to hers, it's like sticking her finger into an electrical socket, a shock of adrenaline that goes straight from the base of her spine all the way up her back. Silence and dimness rule in the Quinjet, and Hansel's eyes darken two shades when his pupils pinwheel outward - suddenly Maria knows that they are both _very_ aware of how closely they sit, how they touch all the way from shoulder to hip to knee, the warmth of the contact through their separate uniforms, the smell of him, the leather of his coat, the bitter tang of cordite underscored by the scent of soap. There's a tension in his frame, a moment where Maria thinks he might lean forward to close the only too-narrow gap between them -

The soldier on Hansel's far side shifts in his sleep, mumbles something unintelligible, and all at once they remember who they are and, more importantly, _where_. Hansel leans back in his seat, tilts back his blonde head to scramble feebly after sleep, while Maria returns to the endless perusal of her papers, head tipped forward to hide her eyes with the sweep of her brown bangs, glancing round the bay through her hair to see if anyone else has noticed her near-miss with SPC Kuhn. 

What few agents are still awake seem more interested in staring at the floorboards than in observing the other passengers on the plane, and Maria sends up a small prayer to whatever deity watches over SHIELD agents, thanking them for their circumspection. 

When turbulence sends a napping Hansel's temple to rest upon the point of her shoulder, his eyes firmly shut and his features at peace, Maria pretends not to acknowledge it, absorbed in her paperwork, even though she has to fight the childish thrill knotting in her belly all the way through the rest of the flight.

xxxxx

Maria remembers being the first one off the plane when the Quinjet touches down at base camp, and Sitwell is waiting for her on the temporary landing pad, bundled so tightly in his winter gear that she can only see his glasses under his fur-trimmed hood, the lenses fogging slightly as he gives her as thorough a sitrep as he can manage. Sitwell's been on site only for a handful of hours, his flight redirected to the Austrian mountains when the information came through on the former HYDRA facility, but he's laid the groundwork for the exploratory mission into the building itself; as Maria learns, there is only one way in or out of the little valley where the facility sits, a switchbacked and gravelly mountain road just barely wide enough to admit two humvees side by side, and Sitwell has already erected a blockade at the mouth of it. It's a good thirty minutes on wheels from base camp, most of a day on foot.

These figures are unacceptable to Maria; though the Quinjet is too large to land in the facility's yard, she distinctly remembers requesting a chopper to be flown in from a base a few towns over, specifically for its maneuverability and smaller size. "What about the Sikorsky?" Maria frowns at Sitwell, gesturing with one hand for the black Russian-make chopper sitting alone and lonely at the end of the makeshift tarmac, its blades still and the engine ice-cold, if the streamers of icicles forming on the nose and landing gear are any indication. "Have you not attempted an aerial infil?" 

(All around them, agents and soldiers have begun the process of unloading the 'jet, mercifully needing little instruction on this process; Maria's train of thought derails briefly, however, when she sees Hansel walk past behind Sitwell, grim-faced and sharing the shoulder-borne load of an enormous black crate with three other soldiers. From the incredulous look on the other troopers' faces, Hansel is bearing the lion's share of the weight.

They'd needed a damn _forklift_ to load that crate in the first place. What in hell -)

She comes back to herself when Sitwell pushes his glasses further up his nose, the only outward indication of his nervousness. " _Attempted,_ yes, ma'am, but it's inadvisable with current wind speeds up in the mountains. I had our best pilot take her up for a test flight a few hours ago, and she nearly turned the whole helicopter into a smear on the valley walls. We're keeping an eye on things from ground level instead." As he says it, Sitwell turns to glance over his shoulder in the direction of the facility, as if speaking of such a cursed place will bring its wrath down upon him. The superstitious air of it makes Maria wish quite fervently that it were the unflappable Coulson here instead, but given that the patron saint of SHIELD has already done her one favor this day, perhaps she ought not press her luck.

"Anything else I ought to be aware of?" 

From the way Sitwell hesitates to answer, Maria thinks she shouldn't have asked. "We're going to have to send the Quinjet further afield than initially estimated for the refuel. The base we borrowed the Sikorsky from doesn't have enough supplies, and unless we want to stop in Spain for a secondary refuel before we attempt the Atlantic, there's nothing else cleared for a Quinjet." 

God's sake, she really ought to get a prescription for these tension headaches; she can already feel the pressure building over her left eye. Is it too much to ask that a simple Level 3 mission go off without any issues? "How much further afield?"

Sitwell actually flinches. "Switzerland." 

" _Switzer_ -" Maria bites it off mid-word, lifts a hand to press at the little nodule of pain in her brow. "Fine. Have it done. Wheels up as soon as we're done offloading, and I want it back here just as quickly." Sitwell makes confirmatory noises, and Maria turns on her heels to start storming for the motor vehicles. Sitwell's own skeleton crew has joined in helping Maria's personnel unload the Quinjet, now; the most important of the crates and boxes, flagged with red squares on the sides, are being loaded into the backs of the trucks for transport up to the blockade. The wind is howling through the mountains, a low, mournful noise that sounds like the mingled voices of a hundred ghosts - some of Sitwell's crew stop to listen, their faces white where their cheeks aren't reddened from the chill, before hurriedly returning to their tasks under the weight of Maria's baleful teal gaze. They can't get to the blockade fast enough for her satisfaction, and Maria loses track of what personnel file into what truck as they take the convoy up to the mouth of the valley. 

She drives the damn humvee herself, just to be contrary.

Maria has to give HYDRA credit, though - they couldn't have picked a prettier spot to hold a woman hostage and experiment on her sleeping body. The mountains silhouetted against the winter-white sky are picturesque, like something out of a postcard, and the view from the mouth of the valley is truly spectacular; just off the edge of the cliff, Maria can see quite literally for miles, which is both an astounding example of the beauty of nature and a stern warning that anyone who loses control of their vehicle is plummeting to their deaths, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Snow is starting to sift down from the heavens, now, whirling and eddying in the air above, and when she exits the Humvee into the higher altitude of the little valley, it is to the kind of biting chill that feels like the very atmosphere is trying to chew its way out through her lungs. The air's a little thinner here, she notices, and some of the agents are already huffing and puffing. 

Hansel, of course, snow settling in his blonde hair and shotgun already slung in its harness across his chest, looks right at home. He seems almost impossibly calm, standing at parade rest in the line of soldiers that forms Strike Team Echo, but Maria does not fail to notice the way his eyes keep sliding sideways, for the dark hulking shape of the facility in the valley beyond the blockade. 

He doesn't have to wait long for his chance at what lies beneath the snow-covered building. 

Sitwell and Hill erect a communications center in a tent off to one side, networking as much of their equipment together as they can; the end result, Maria thinks, would make Jason Grimm click his tongue and shake his head, because it resembles nothing so much as a college LAN party, a baker's dozen of laptops perched on empty crates and linked into a main screen via what seems like miles of Cat-5. The heat of the electronic equipment makes the tent almost stiflingly hot, and smell faintly of burnt plastic. _All that's missing are the drinks and pizza boxes,_ snorts Maria, pacing back and forth behind the agents seated at their makeshift workstations as Sitwell walks his crew through the systems checks. 

(There's a brief hiccup where nothing seems to be happening on the main screen, until an agent crawling on her hands and knees between the rows of crates finds a mismatched wire and plugs it into the correct socket. The screen leaps to life, and Maria lets out a breath she didn't realize she was holding.

If that is the worst problem they encounter on this mission, she will be eternally grateful.) 

Boxes begin to populate on the big screen as Sitwell runs through the comm checks, tagging each member of the strike team via voice recognition and biometrics; Bravo Team sounds off one by one, rectangles appearing on the screen with their status, name and callsign as they do, with more detailed information on the laptops themselves. Everything appears to be running smoothly when Echo sounds off ("Echo Five, standing by," grates Hansel over the speakers, and a little box appears on the big screen, labelled ECHO-5 - SPC H. KUHN - STATUS GREEN) and by the time Foxtrot has had their variables plugged into the system, the boxes have been shrunk and moved to one side, making way for a computer-generated layout of the HYDRA facility. Maria nods approvingly as she moves among the working agents, watching their hands fly over the keys, her own hands clasped at the small of her back. They call updates and adjustments back and forth as they work, a colony of twittering birds inter-meshing themselves on the fly. It doesn't help her headache in the slightest, but the precision changes that result form it, the fine-tuning of response time and speed, motivate her to allow the quiet commentary to continue.

The plan is simple, and goes off without much complication, at first. Strike Team Foxtrot stays behind, to control the choke point that is the blockade, while Bravo and Echo move in tandem together for the crux of the L that forms the facility; Maria, arms folded across her chest now, watches the little dots on-screen, each one representing the exact location of a particular soldier, move swiftly across the floor plan. They clear out the central structure, their methods thorough and their movements well-organized and when Bravo breaks away to clear the north wing, Echo does the same with the east; the surveyors come in behind them and begin to document the site, and a corner of the big screen lights up with feed from the main videographer's camera. The inside of the structure is exactly what Maria would expect of a turn-of-the-century hospital left to decay, with the subtle hallmarks of a rushed evacuation - peeling paint on the walls, furniture cast aside in rusting, twisted heaps against the baseboards, water stains forming brown rings in what are undoubtedly asbestos-filled drop ceilings. 

( _"Hmm, they left in an awful hurry,"_ notes someone on the documentary team, before Sitwell mutes the feed in favor of the strike teams' radio channel.)

The HYDRA logo on the lobby floor, picked out in tile that is still vividly red even beneath the better part of a century's worth of dirt and grime, makes the ambient chatter in the tent fall completely silent, as every agent present in that tent realizes that they are rediscovering history, no matter how unseemly it may be. 

The radio noise is incredibly loud in the resulting quiet, interrupted only by the background hum of computer fans. _"Command, this is Echo Six, do you read me?"_ comes the voice of the strike team leader, his dot on the screen marked with his information pulsing brightly in time with his voice. Sitwell presses his fingers to his earpiece, while Maria mutes her own; there's a slight transmission delay between her earpiece and the speakers on the man screen, and it's rather like listening to two televisions tuned to the same channel, but out of sync. 

"Echo Six, this is Command Two," says the agent into his mic. "What have you found?"

 _"A back storage area, with some filing cabinets. They're locked, but there's definitely something inside. Looks untouched."_ There comes a loud metallic THWANG across the radio, and the dot marked ECHO-5 hops a few feet to the side. Maria almost hopes that Hansel broke his foot kicking the damn cabinet. _"Make that mostly untouched."_

"We'll send you a secondary survey team," Sitwell says, as smoothly as if the thunking sound and subsequent commentary never happened. "Anything else to report?"

 _"Nothing yet, sir. This side of the facility seems more intact than the lobby did, though,"_ notes Echo Six, his dot moving back to the doorway of the storage area and out into the hallway, the markers of his soldiers following him like a line of ducklings after their mother. _"Not just less environmental damage - the furniture's badly decayed, but still mostly upright and in place. No sign of whatever forced the evac."_

"Keep us posted, Echo," says Maria, activating her mic just long enough to do so; she doesn't think she imagines the the crispness of Six's _"Yes ma'am"_ , or the way the strike team seems to move a little more quickly down the hallways, fanning out and sweeping what seems to be a series of administrative offices. A second video feed, this time of their secondary videographer as he and his associates hustle to catch up with Echo Team, pops up in the corner of the screen opposite from the lobby group. Sitwell performs his check-ins with Bravo, earns the expected response - their wing was clearly once used to medical procedures, but it's barren from the tiled floors to the ceiling, and Bravo has nothing significant yet to report as they work their way through their larger wing. The lobby team eventually splits in half and sends their videographer towards Bravo Team; the facility is just as yawning and empty as Bravo reports it to be, though the rust-colored stains on the tile of one room the camera passes are a bit worrying. 

Maria is just starting to relax a little when the explosion rocks the valley. 

The equipment rattles on its boxes, and the screen flickers, both video feeds fading to black; Maria, already on her feet, is the first to react, urgently flicking on her earpiece while Sitwell and his team try desperately to recover the feeds. "Echo Team, Bravo Team, this is Command One, I need a sitrep!"

 _"Command One, Echo Six,"_ comes the first transmission; it's full of static, but she can still identify his voice, can hear accompanying shouting in the background as the members of Strike Team Echo call out to one another, assuring their comrades that no one has been lost. _"We have an agent down, hit his head when the building shook. That sounded like it came from the north wing -"_

 _"Contact, contact, repeat, Command, Bravo Team has enemy contact!"_ howls Bravo Six across the radio, gunshots echoing in the background, and when Maria's gaze darts to the northern section of the blueprints, she sees that Bravo Team's lights have vanished from the board; their last known vicinity is pinpointed with haphazard yellow markers on the big screen, and Sitwell's team are click-clacking away and shouting across one another as they try to recover positioning. 

Maria can't wait that long; every second wasted might be killing her men. "Foxtrot Team, this is Command One, you're with me!" Maria snarls into the mic, bolting out the door of the tent and into the snow and cold. It's like running through a brick wall at this altitude, the chill like a punch to the gut, but the soldiers of Strike Team Foxtrot rise from their positions on the blockade as she passes, men and women falling easily into step with her as she dashes for the facility. Snow crunches under their feet, settles on their shoulders and gear, and she barely notices. "Echo Team, I need you to evac the survey team, get all the non-combatants out of the building _now!_ Bravo, hunker down, reinforcements are enroute!" 

_"Roger that, Command,"_ comes the voice of Echo Six, but Bravo doesn't respond. She hopes that doesn't mean what she thinks it means. 

Maria Hill's last clear memory is of hitting the door to the facility lobby with her sidearm in hand; everything after that is a collection of moments, still images snatched out of the fabric of time, little glimpses of the series of events like pearls broken loose of their string, related and (mostly) sequential, but only tentatively connected to one another. She remembers hauling a man out of the debris of a collapsed wall, his face painted flour-white with brick dust; she remembers shouting orders and pointing out cover positions as she and a handful of soldiers advance up a hallway, remembers the unfamiliar voice of what must have been one of the survey team getting on a dead man's radio, her voice remarkably steady in all the chaos. 

She remembers finding a Kevlar-clad body in the hallway, a ragged hole blown up from under his jaw where Bravo Three put his own gun under his chin and pulled the trigger, blood and bits of brain splattered across the wall and the floor, squelching underneath the soles of her shoes. She remembers someone saying, "Oh, _god,_ " and has no way to be certain if it was her.

Remembers more bodies, some in armor, some in suits, and finding a handful of sobbing agents that decide they would rather throw themselves through the windows and out into the snow than face Maria head-on, screaming as if she is a monster risen from the depths of their worst nightmares.

Remembers breathing fetid, rank air, and, light-headed, staring down at her hands as the walls writhe and shift around her, twisting into angles and distortions worthy of only the most eldritch of abominations. The peels and tears in the paint start to effuse blood, as if the very walls are sweating scarlet, and suddenly the tile is an undulating sea beneath her feet.

Remembers the heat of it, the strike and force and pressure of it, when the bullet hits her in the gut; when she looks up, it is no SHIELD agent at all that wields the gun, but a figure clad all in black, the HYDRA logo brilliant red on his chest. Maria unhesitatingly shoots him in the face before she falls against the wall, slumps to the floor, her free hand over the hot fountain of her wound. The radio chatter is nothing but the incoherent screeching of the damned, now; she can't understand a word of it, and there seems no point in calling for help, not when all the world has become a madhouse. 

She sits there against the wall, staring at the spill of red across her own white hand, for what feels like hours, days, a lifetime; then there comes the tromp of heavy boots, and when Maria lifts her dimming gaze she sees the new HYDRA agent step over the body of the old, a black gasmask obscuring his face, shotgun held in his leather-gloved hands and death writ in every line of his black uniform.

The pistol in her hand looks like the light of salvation now, and she lifts and fires, misses wide left, her fingers trembling and the bullet itself taking a curving, spiraling path before her eyes; then the HYDRA agent is suddenly _on her_ and they're wrestling for control the gun, and he's cursing in fluent, harshly-enunciated German, the words somehow more _real_ than anything else around them - even the edges of her flesh, of her _bones_ , of his shape, are flickering and unsteady, figments of someone else's imagination. They're ghosts in this dead place, and as a ghost she has no strength, and she can't hold on to the damn sidearm, even though she _knows_ that it's her last resort, the last hold she has on _being real_ -

The HYDRA agent pries her fingers from the grip of the pistol, one painstaking joint at a time, before he pulls her hard into his body, trapping her arms against her sides to keep her from striking him. Her eyes flutter shut when his uniform comes in contact with her bullet wound, but she sucks in a hard breath against the pain in her gut; the HYDRA agent smells familiar, tantalizingly so, and Maria claws her way towards the clarity of that scent with all the strength left in her narrow frame.

Leather, gunpowder and soap. 

"Hansel?" she mumbles, before blackness consumes all.

xxxxx

Maria's been on the outside of a quarantine tent enough times to guess what one looks like from the inside.

It takes her several long minutes, sifting upwards through the stages of consciousness, to realize that that's what she's laying under; translucent plastic sheeting drapes her bed ( _Gurney,_ she thinks in a spurt of coherency, _it's a hospital gurney_ ) with backwards HAZARD lettering stenciled across them in foot-high letters and multiple languages. An IV is in her arm dripping cold liquid into her veins, an EKG to her left merrily beeping out the track of her pulse, slower than it ought to, threadier than Maria knows it should be. Nothing hurts, at least, but with the dulling of pain comes a dulling of sensation, of reflex. It takes what feels like an hour to move her hand to cover the place where her wound was, and the motion makes her bandages crinkle against her skin, a plasticky sound-sensation that takes her longer than it should to process. 

Gutshot. Right. She remembers that. But what ....?

There are figures visible moving beyond the sheeting, blurry little blobs of color, mostly white with a few that shade into black, shifting restlessly back and forth and making her dizzy with the movement. She can hear two men talking indistinctly to one another; Maria is exhausted by the effort of identifying her surroundings, however, and closes her eyes, focusing on the sounds of the men talking. If she concentrates enough, she can almost understand what they're saying -

".... need you to cooperate with me on this, Herr Kuhn," she hears, and the measured, calm evenness of the words bring to mind a single man, a single voice: Phil Coulson, who should have _been_ there at the Dornröschen facility, should have _been_ there to back her up.

(Maria wonders fleetingly if Sitwell got himself shot, too, or if it was only she who was stupid enough to wander into something that SHIELD thought could be contagious.)

" _Zur Hölle mit dir,_ " growls a familiar rough-toned voice, and something in Maria eases to know that Hansel is not very far away, that if she had the strength to call out, that he would be close enough to react. His accent is heavy, thick as molasses with the weight of his upset. "How ken I _cooperate_ mit hyu if I do not understend hyur question?"

"It's a very simple question," says Coulson, with the mildly patronizing tones that make him sound as if he is addressing a particularly slow child. "What part do you not understand?"

"These vords," and there's a sound like a hand smacking a piece of paper, a snort of irritation from Hansel. "I do not - _vas ist -_ " 

Coulson makes an understanding noise, and she can almost see him nodding calmly, as if the corner-piece of a jigsaw puzzle has finally come to light and can now be solved. "I forgot that English is your second language. Would it be easier if I read it to you? Here," and Maria can hear the shuffling of papers around, an exchange from one to the other. "What it says, Herr Kuhn, is simply this: While you had AD Hill in your custody after her exposure to the hallucinogenic agent in the facility, did she say or do anything that would lead you to believe that she has been compromised?"

The cold drip of the IV feels more like ice-water than ever. 

_Compromised._ It's a subtle, understated bit of wordsmithing, and the death knell for many an otherwise promising career at SHIELD; oh, certainly agents already trained and capable can be found other positions, other uses, but being compromised is a taint, a stain on their permanent record, a hint of unreliability where SHIELD values, above all other things, consistency. 

The worst part of hearing Coulson ask Hansel such a question, though, is that she has _no idea_ how he will answer. 

It takes several long, heart-stopping seconds before he speaks, and when the answer comes it is a steady, calm "No."

Scritcha-scratch of a pen against paper; Maria rather doubts Coulson is even looking up at this point. "You're certain?" 

"Yes. Absolutely. Are ve finished here?" says Hansel with a pointed growl, and though Maria doesn't catch what Coulson says in reply, it's only because her blood is pounding in her ears, like the beating of brass drums, basso profundo in her head. Coulson doesn't know Hansel like she does, doesn't know his quirks, his idiosyncrasies - the most prominent of which is his tendency to speak practically in pidgin, answering questions spoken in English with words in German. Hansel has to _focus_ to speak correctly all the time, has to rein in the knee-jerk twitch caused by a lifetime spent thinking, and reacting, almost entirely in his native tongue. 

But Hansel said **no,** not _nein,_ as is his wont. Followed it up with a _yes_ just for completion's sake. Coulson didn't catch it, didn't think to question it, but Maria does. 

_He lied,_ she dares to think in the privacy of her own brain, staring up at the plastic ceiling of the quarantine tent. _He **lied.** Why did he lie? _

_God help me, what happened while I was out?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation Notes:
> 
> Zur Hölle mit dir - To hell with you


	8. Dornröschen: Hansel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter contains more descriptions of gore, and some bonus feels at the end. Very mildly dubious consent if you tilt your head and squint? 
> 
> Oh, and for those who don't remember/never knew about European currency before the advent of the euro, a pfennig is basically a German penny (1/100th of a Deutschmark).

Hansel and Maria remember Austria very, very differently.

Afterward, when they grill him relentlessly on everything that has occurred (because as much as SHIELD doesn't like it, the old hunter is their only reliable source of intel on entirely too much of the latter parts of the Dornröschen operation) he recites the series of events is a calm, bored voice, never varying, never embellishing; the events at the facility in the mountains hardly need his embroidery to imprint themselves firmly on the souls of those who were present, sees little point in adding his two _pfennig_ to to the pile when the voices of so many others are scrambling to be heard. 

Unfortunately, the number of men and women who exited the northern wing of the facility with both life and sanity intact are few in number - and there are some things that can only be enumerated by someone who was there. So, he drinks his coffee, sobers up and tells the story, over and over again through grit teeth, until it is everything that Hansel can do not to shove Agent Coulson's tie down his own throat. 

It does not help that the agent knows that something is being hidden about the entire Dornröschen affair, and is relentless in the hunt to expose it. That he has chosen his target very poorly in Hansel Kuhn, however, does not seem to cross Phil Coulson's mind. 

(He always starts after they exit the plane, though; they cannot ask him for details about how very near he came to kissing Maria Hill in the cargo bay of a Quinjet if he skips over the journey entirely. SHIELD and its agents need never know how dearly he treasures the smell of her hair, the sight of her parted lips, the gleam of teal beneath the sweep of her brown bangs and the heat of her thigh alongside his, entirely innocent and yet profoundly profane - these are things for Hansel and Hansel alone to remember, a secret he carries in the hidden places of his blackened heart.)

Strike Team Echo consists of four bright young SHIELD agents, Hansel, and one Delta Force transplant culled from the Army Special Forces after a mission that he later insists, with a lopsided smirk, that Hansel isn't cleared high enough to know about; his name is Sergeant James Doyle, Echo Six and current team leader, and when he and Hansel first get a good look at one another, standing across from each other on a temporary tarmac in Austria, Doyle tilts his head, rests his gloved hands absently on his rifle, and squints one khaki-green eye at him. "Do I know you from somewhere, soldier?" 

Hansel shakes his head, studying his prospective commander - there's a certain familiarness in the gunslinger way in which he holds himself, a passing similarity to how his features are arranged that reminds him faintly of Will, even though Will is a handful of years the sergeant's junior - but from Doyle's dark head of hair and deep tan, Hansel puts it down to a passing resemblance, an echo of the same competence in command that his eldest son radiates so readily. " _Nein_. Not unless hyu are from Germany," he adds, a feeble sally at a reasonably friendly relationship with the man he will have to call _sir_ for the foreseeable future. 

Fortunately, it doesn't take much to get Doyle smiling. "Nah, man, I'm from Modesto," smirks the soldier, just before he starts barking orders to Echo Team to help get the 'jet unloaded, and that is the last they speak on the subject for nearly a decade. 

(Maria will realize, later, that she ought to have examined SGT Doyle's personnel file a little more closely, that anything trimmed so neat and precise should have given her an inkling that something was out of place; as it was, she had been more focused on selecting personnel that would not clash with Hansel's admittedly interesting background, and Doyle fit all the criteria she needed, his service record exemplary and his skills more than adequate. 

That no one else seemed to notice it either - no one but the men themselves, and each of _them_ with other, more important concerns to hold their attention - is cold comfort.)

Doyle is a steady presence in the swirling sea of chaos that is the Dornröschen base camp, and Hansel is surprisingly happy to allow himself to be directed by him for a short time; the unloading of the 'jet is an easy, repetitive task, though he likely gives his team members the shock of his life when he effortlessly lifts the corner of what should be an impossibly heavy crate, but Hansel has always been far stronger than those around him gave him credit for. With two dozen strong soldiers to unburden the 'jet, it takes less time than expected before all of the required equipment is offloaded, some into the base camp tents, others into the backs of Humvees. From there, the soldiers themselves are loaded into the vehicles and up the gravel road (if it can be called a road; Hansel makes the mistake of peering out a window when his transport veers a little too close to the edge, and is treated to a view thousands of feet straight _down_ before the Humvee centers out again) to the blockade at the center of the valley.

Snow is sifting down from the iron-grey skies, fluffy and thick, like a handful of eiderdown thrown towards the sky, blanketing white across the landscape. When Hansel exits the vehicle and out into the winter air, as cold and choking as any from his days as a hunter, it feels unsettlingly like a homecoming. 

Doyle greets the soldiers stationed up on the blockade like old friends, trading quips with their commander in tones dripping with sarcasm; Strike Team Echo is in one of the first Humvees to make the torturous climb to the Dornröschen facility, and so can be allowed the mild luxury of a few moments to get their bearings, acclimate to the thinness of the air. By the time Maria Hill has parked her Humvee, though, her boots crunching across the thin layer of fresh snow, the sergeant has corralled them all into a semblance of discipline, at parade rest in a neat line on the back side of the blockade, hands behind their backs and feet shoulder-width apart. Doyle is chewing the inside of his cheek as Maria passes - his brushes with the higher-ups of SHIELD command, Hansel thinks, are few and far between - but AD Hill does not approach, does not reprimand, merely checks Doyle's work with a stern sweep of her teal gaze and stiff-legs like an angry cat for the command tent. 

Once she is past, and only then, does Hansel allow himself a moment of inattention, to slide his robin's-egg eyes sideways, for the shadow of the facility in the valley. 

(He is both eager and shaken to his core to have finally arrived, to be _doing something_ to investigate the horrors of his sister's past - because while the wolf in him thirsts for the blood of those who wronged him and his family, he fears that the truth of the matter is far worse than can be summoned by his own imagination. 

This Hansel knows: that there are men and there are monsters, and only too often the line between is blurred beyond all recognition. How long, the hunter wonders, did Gretel spend here, trapped, a helpless captive of her own body, while soldiers and scientists preyed upon her? What sick and strange perversions of humanity was his sister forced to bear, only to be allowed to heal afterwards, made once again a clean canvas to be painted upon in bloody red?

And if she cannot be redeemed - is doomed to sleep forever, or worse, to wake a ravening beast - can she ever be given even the meager dignity of being avenged?)

Hansel is startled out of his contemplations of the Dornröschen facility by the radio checks - while the sleek black earpiece is truly impressive, a technological marvel for a man to whom computers are just shy of black sorcery, he is unused to the tinny noise of other voices in his head, uncomfortably reminded of the spirits he was sometimes called upon to banish. Bravo Team and Foxtrot Team stand in their own lines a little ways apart from Echo, however, and Hansel can match a voice to a face as the soldiers of Bravo check in one by one, hands to their earpieces to trigger their mics; when his turn comes, down the line of Echo as inexorable at the tide, he presses his finger to the earpiece and manages a calm, "Echo Five, standing by," his words little more than a copy of his comrades' - but as not even Doyle side-eyes him for it, it seems the correct thing to say. 

A scarce moment after Hansel's identification, Doyle makes a similar gesture, his loose-cuffed sleeve sliding briefly downward to flash the crimson Delta knife tattooed on the inside of his forearm. His free hand comes automatically to rest on the body of his carbine, a habitual gesture, from where Hansel sees the metal has been worn shiny and smooth from the calluses on his fingers. "Echo Six, standing by. We are all green, Command."

_"Roger that, Echo Six. Foxtrot team, report,"_ comes the voice of Maria's second in command, the bespectacled Sitwell, whom Hansel has only glimpsed in passing; he remembers the fur collar of his coat and the shining of the Quinjet's landing lights off of his lenses, and little else of the compact agent. He seems to command enough respect for the situation, however, as Foxtrot obliges him gamely enough, another roll-call of soldiers into the mic, their voices bouncing around like bullets on the inside of Hansel's skull. 

By the time Doyle is calling for the line to move out, however, Hansel is beginning to adjust to the unwelcome visitors inside his brain; it takes practice, he learns slowly as he falls into line with the other troops, but it is not so very unlike hunting with Gretel that he cannot overcome it. He is already used to reading how those around him will move and react, understands how to match another hunter's pace and guard their flank, what stimuli to discard and what to pay attention to. It is not so very different, learning to apply this to the voices in his head and in his ear. Foxtrot stays behind them, relieving their fellows up on the blockade, and Doyle leads Echo lockstep with Bravo for the snow-capped structure. Snow crunches under their feet and settles in their hair and on their gear, limning the world in white, and their breath puffs out like dragonsmoke before them.

There's one eerie moment when they hit the lobby doors, though, and all the soldiers around Hansel fall utterly silent - no chatter on the radio, no muttered comments or jingling of gear. He thinks they all hardly dare to breathe. The HYDRA logo, still a vivid scarlet in the mosaic tiles of the lobby floor, stares up at them with its death's-head and dares them all to cross the expanse into the unknown. 

Eleven men and women, combat-hardened agents all, balked at the threshold by _a drawing of an octopus._

Hansel, of course, is the only one who is _entirely_ unimpressed, and when he coughs pointedly in the back of his throat, it seems enough to break the spell; Doyle's dark head comes up, at least, and he and Bravo Six confer a few moments as to the dispatchment of the two strike teams. A series of low, quiet commands, and Doyle himself leads the charge across the red and black seal, determined not to allow this spectre of the past to delay their mission any longer. Hansel feels his appraisal of the man rise a tick or two. 

There is a sense of abandonment to the building that Hansel, oddly enough, finds comforting. The mildewed ceilings, the warp and rust on the piles of twisted furniture, the sensation in the back of his mind that, somewhere, he ought to hear water dripping - these things are all familiar, all hallmarks of the lairs of beasts he has been slaying since he was old enough to hold a weapon. The quiet steps of the soldiers of Echo Team as they delve among the halls could easily be the footsteps of his sister, Gretel, or even that of his sons; Doyle leads the way as they clear room after room, hall after hall, floor after floor of empty decrepit nothingness. The halls are narrow enough that they follow him in single file for most of it, fanning out in larger spaces only to collapse again into a tight column of efficiency when space is once more limited. 

(Hansel is the rearguard, shotgun in hand, blonde head swiveling back and forth as they clear rooms and cross intersections of corridors. He has yet to decide if this is a position accorded to him by virtue of his sharp eye and quick reflexes, or merely one to keep him out of the other soldiers' way.)

When Doyle and Bravo Six agree that the central structure has been swept to satisfaction, they radio back to the command tent that the documentary team is clear to enter, and Doyle leads them back down through the floors, then into the east wing. The change in atmosphere is almost immediate - the east wing is _carpeted,_ for one, though the old fibers crunch beneath their feet, wet with mildew and frozen from the winter outside. (Several of the soldiers wince to hear the noise, a tinkling like walking across broken glass.) But here, unlike elsewhere in the structure the furniture is not cast aside in haste, not broken into pieces or even mostly out of place - the vagaries of time have caused the wood of the doorways to warp out of true, and in one room a winter-bare tree has grown too close to the structure's foundation and caused a floor to buckle, a window to smash inward - but for the most part, the wing resembles nothing so much as a time-lost shadow of the offices of SHIELD, with only its personnel missing. 

Every time they find a desk or cabinet, they rifle through the drawers, hunting for a scrap of paper left behind, a file, a photograph, anything; they find a few such mementos, things handwritten in German about lunch policies and office politics, and once a black and white photograph of an SS officer with his wife, but nothing of any import, nothing left behind that might offer them a clue to what in nine hells has happened here. 

Until they find the only locked room on the premises, at the very back left corner of the wing, the door warped so badly into its frame that it might as well be fused there. 

Hansel, adrenaline surging through his veins, allows the other members of Echo Team about five minutes to try their hand at getting the damn thing open before he very calmly marches to the head of the column, straps his shotgun down in his sling, and surges forward, hitting the door with all his weight in his left shoulder. The aged wood, soft from the drip and decay of water and no match for the witch hunter's strength, practically explodes inward in a shower of splinters and dust, leaving Hansel standing amidst the destruction with scarcely even a mark on his black leather coat. 

Doyle whistles low under his breath. " _Damn_ , Kuhn. You get that arm at Smith and Wesson?"

"Something like that," Hansel grins back, regaining his grip on his shotgun as soldiers flow to either side of him, sweeping the area with practiced, efficient care. 

The storage rooms aren't excessively large - there's a line of metal lockers for what he assumes were the former employees, and some empty old rifle cabinets, the locks smashed open, that make Hansel's eyebrows rise - but the real coup is in a far, untouched corner: a trio of metal filing cabinets, burgundy with rust where the paint has flaked away. A perfunctory test of the drawer handles proves that the cabinets are locked, though the weight of them proves they are not vacant. When Hansel lifts the butt of his rifle to dash them open, Doyle puts out a hand to stop him. "No, hold up. We don't know what's in there, best we just take them out whole, let the techies pop the lock." He lifts his other hand, presses it to his earpiece as he steps away from Hansel and the cabinets both. "Command, this is Echo Six, do you read me?"

_"Echo Six, this is Command Two,"_ speaks Sitwell into the hunter's earpiece. _"What have you found?"_

"A back storage area, with some filing cabinets. They're locked, but there's definitely something inside. Looks untouched." Hansel, in a fit of pique, swings his boot into the side of one of the cabinets; the _thwang_ it makes reverberates through the building, causes Hansel to skip a few feet sideways while Doyle, and most of the rest of Echo, bite the insides of their cheeks against a series of smiles. "Make that mostly untouched."

_"We'll send you a secondary survey team,"_ deadpans Sitwell, sounding about as unimpressed as Hansel feels. _"Anything else to report?"_

"Nothing yet, sir," notes Doyle; he gestures for the team to follow him as he pokes his head out into the hall, and they follow him in single file as they venture back out into the structure, following the corridors to cover ground they haven't already cleared. "This side of the facility seems more intact than the lobby did, though. Not just less environmental damage - the furniture's badly decayed, but still mostly upright and in place. No sign of whatever forced the evac." 

_"Keep us posted, Echo."_ Maria Hill's voice is like a spike of ice to the backs of their necks; all at once, Echo Team walks taller, moves faster. Even Doyle's "Yes ma'am" sounds sharper around the edges, all of them aware of the eye of the Left Hand of God upon them. They are just sweeping the last of a series of administrative offices when a trio of suits catch up to them, huffing and puffing in the cold air; salutes are exchanged between the videographer and Doyle, and Echo backtracks through the wing one last time, the documentary team sandwiched between the soldiers. The two agents not carrying either guns or cameras are making copious notations on paper notepads as they go, the shorthand sharp-angled and indecipherable to Hansel's eye. 

Later, Hansel will feel guilty about allowing his mind to drift; he, of all people, should be the most aware of that hunter's adage, that when everything seems to be going well, it is the perfect time for everything to go to hell. But though he walks with shotgun in hand through the corridors of the Dornröschen facility, his mind lies back in that rear storage room, with the cabinets at the files they hopefully contain - information on Gretel and her time here? He can only hope -

The explosion shakes the building, and the unsteady floor beneath Hansel's feet collapses. 

They only fall about five feet, down into the building's crawlspace, but the rubble sends a cloud of dust into the air and covers them all in flour-like smears of white, a dark mockery of the dusting of snow they all received earlier in the open air. Hansel's the first one back on his feet, boots braced on the debris and face turned into the lapel of one jacket, to filter the dust; Doyle is the next one up, spluttering and choking, before his voice is strident in the enclosed space, bellowing for a sound-off from his soldiers ("Everyone okay? Talk to me!") moments before Maria is howling in their ears like the wrath of kings, demanding a sitrep of her own. 

Doyle spares a moment to tug the green gaiter at his neck up over his mouth and nose before he answers, soldiers all around them answering his call, discordant and loud in the wake of the explosion. Two of the Echoes lift the limp videographer between them, his camera a smashed scattering of plastic and glass among the debris, red gushing from a wound on his forehead where his face contacted with the floor after the collapse into the crawlspace. "Command One, Echo Six," coughs the sergeant, and Hansel hears static popping and clicking in his earpiece. "We have an agent down, hit his head when the building shook. That sounded like it came from the north wing -"

_"Contact, contact, repeat, Command, Bravo Team has enemy contact!"_ Gunshots and screaming, and what Hansel can only assume is Bravo Six, howling like he's been gutted. All of Echo goes still for a long, terrible moment, eight sets of eyes wide and round in the dimness, and then Doyle is moving and Maria is barking the kind of orders that brook no argument. 

The gully of the collapsed crawlspace ends near the exit to the lobby, and Doyle makes the jump at a dead run, clambering up the piles of debris as easily as if he's climbing a ladder. Getting the other soldiers up and over, as well as the dead weight of the unconscious videographer, are less efficiently done, precious seconds burning away as they haul him back onto level ground. The lobby itself has fared as badly as the subfloor has - a wall's collapsed and trapped one of the documentary team under it, and as they're digging him out Maria and Foxtrot Team arrive, the Assistant Director fearlessly launching herself at the rubble, bare-nailed hands clawing at the debris. It's she who eventually reaches him and hauls him bodily out - Hansel is not the only member of SHIELD whose strength is consistently underestimated - and then she's leading her team toward the north wing, and Doyle is gathering the rest of the documentary agents around Echo like chicks under a hen's wing. 

He's dizzy from the dust by the time they finally exit the building, and Echo and the non-combatants are all silent as they march back for the relative safety of the blockade, a staggered line of unsteady agents and those carrying out the wounded. The cold, clean air serves to clear all their heads, at least; they have enough collective wit to set their injured in the cargo area of the nearest Humvee and let a medic check them all over. No serious injuries, a coup on any other day, but all of Strike Team Echo is listening hard at their earpieces to the chaos inside the facility, all eyes on the building in the valley and the path in the snow carved by their stomping feet. They can hear little more than gunshots and screeches, and Maria giving advancement orders to Foxtrot Team as they explore suddenly hostile territory.

Much of Echo sits either on or around the Humvee, leaned forward with their elbows on their thighs and their faces grim, pasty-pale where brick dust and snow have settled across their forms; Hansel himself stands a little off to one side, hand on his shotgun, and waves off the medics when they attempt to dab antiseptic at a minor scratch on his cheek. Doyle, himself no worse for the wear, leaves his men and clambers up onto the blockade for a better look at the facility, right as an unfamiliar female voice emerges from the pop and static of the radio, her tone remarkably level and calm, given the fact that Hansel can still hear gunshots being fired in the background of her transmission. 

_"Can anyone hear me? This is Agent Lee, with the surveyors -"_

A volley of hands reaching for their earpieces, but it's Sitwell who answers first, seizing the opportunity to give his agents some illusion of a measure of control. _"Lee, we hear you loud and clear! We need a sitrep, what in hell is going on?"_

_"You got me there, sir,"_ says Agent Lee, a hint of manic laughter making her voice tremble, but not crack. _"I don't know what happened, all I know is one of the Bravos started - started fucking **laughing** and then it was all gunshots and screaming -"_

_"Lee, this AD Hill, I need you to take cover and keep steady,"_ comes Maria's voice across the comms, cutting like a knife, exactly the right kind of frigid calm to quell the fever of the agent's fear before it gets the better of her. _"We're on our way to you, just sit tight."_

_"Yes, ma'am,"_ breathes Lee, and that's the last that Hansel hears of her; he'll ask later if she ever made it out alive, if she was one of the lucky few, but no one seems to know, and by then he has other concerns to distract him from the truth of her fate. 

A few minutes pass in similar fashion as before, with Maria calling orders and Foxtrot team methodically working their way through the north wing; only now it's getting harder to hear her, because someone's mic is stuck open and there's multiple voices weeping and shrieking into it, an interwoven wailing of the damned that makes Doyle shudder up on the blockade, and the hairs prickle at the back of Hansel's neck. At one point, they hear a window shatter, and in moments a troop of crazy-eyed SHIELD agents in suits come bolting up the path to the mouth of the valley like they're being chased by the very hounds of Hell; Doyle hails them from up on the blockade, and then turn as one to stare at him and scream in horror, scattering through the blockade camp like rats abandoning a sinking ship. 

Two of them jump straight off the cliff at the edge of the gravel road before anyone realizes that something is desperately wrong. 

One of the medical officers comes to the correct conclusion the fastest, shouting warnings and orders, and Echo rises from its brief rest in the shadow of the blockade to corral and contain the rest of the crazed agents, before they can hurt themselves or others - easier said than done, given that they lash out with extreme violence when the soldiers get too close. It's merry chaos for what seems like a lifetime, Hansel chasing maddened agents with pale, terrified faces and pupils shrunk to the size of pinpricks, restraining them where possible, dashing them in the head with the butt of his rifle when it isn't. Blessedly, he doesn't have to resort to the latter very often, but after one of Echo's own nearly gets brained with a rock, Hansel is even less inclined than normal to take any chances.

He tries very hard not to think about how he can no longer hear Maria giving orders on the radio, that the wailing and screaming has not stopped, or how he can still hear gunshots echoing from the facility in the valley.

He's pinning the last of the mad agents face-down in the snow, Doyle zip-tying the flailing woman's limbs together while Hansel weighs her down with a knee in her back, when someone finally dares to spit into the open air, "What the _fuck_ was that?" 

"Something biological," says Doyle grimly, khaki-green eyes narrowed and on his work, but there's something haunted there, some hint that the sergeant speaks from experience. "Chemical agent, maybe. Either way, we're pretty fucked if we stay here much longer. _Command!_ " The last is bellowed towards the command tent, his earpiece useless, and in seconds the Delta soldier is on his feet and pacing away, for the Humvees and the the pile of bound and gagged agents. Some of them are still trying, in vain, to either bite at their comrades or wriggle loose. 

Sitwell emerges from the command tent, his round face pale behind his lenses, bee-lining for Doyle and Echo Team. "Talk to me, Echo." 

"Sir, we need to evacuate, _immediately_ ," is all Hansel hears Doyle saying before he catches sight of a ragtag group of Foxtrot soldiers approaching the blockade; Hansel shouts a warning, and every manned weapon in the blockade turns to sight upon them in a volley of clicks of safeties being switched off. 

"Hold your fire, hold your fire!" shouts Foxtrot Six, a petite woman with black hair and a lantern jawline, her left arm lashed to her own chest with a belt, a battlefield sling to stabilize the nasty wound in her shoulder. "We've got wounded, hold your goddamn fire!" She isn't kidding, as Hansel's eye roves across the men and women at her back, soldiers and suits both; several are leaning on each other for support, all of them are limping, and the head of one suited man lolls low against his collarbone, chest and face spattered with blood where he hangs between two soldiers, neither of which have come out unscathed themselves. 

"Lieutenant Dempsey?" calls Sitwell, waving off Echo Team and the various other agents that have trained their sidearms upon the ragged band. The medics surge forward past the line of scrimmage at the signal, faces grim as they triage what is left of Foxtrot; Dempsey herself nearly falls over when the first medic to reach her probes a little too hard at the gunshot wound in her shoulder. "What happened to you?" 

"Ambushed by Bravo," bites out Dempsey, fire in her eyes and bitterness in her voice. "What was left of it, anyway. They've all lost their goddamn minds, sir, shooting anything that moves. Aaah, _fuck_ that hurts!" she hisses, directing the oath at the medic exploring the wound at her shoulder, before she cuts her eyes back to Sitwell. "We got cut off from the point party, circled around back to the exit. I grabbed all the personnel I could find and bugged out before we lost any more people." 

"Definitely some sort of chemical agent, probably an aerosol, nothing else works that fast. Sir, it isn't safe here, not without the right equipment," counsels Doyle with a grim expression. Sitwell searches his face a moment, then nods and makes a gesture in the air that has all of Echo, and most of the suited agents, moving swiftly for the Humvees. Hansel is pulled along simply by the force of their gravity.

"Load 'em up and move out! Evac protocols, wounded first and leave the equipment! Someone get ahold of base camp, let them know we're coming." 

Hansel spends several long minutes alongside Doyle, Sitwell and the Echoes, helping the wounded cram into the backs of the soon-idling Humvees; once they are filled to capacity, they slam the doors shut, thunk fists on the vehicles' armored sides, and watch the drivers peel off down the mountain road in skirls of gravel, snow and dust. It's executed with surprising orderliness and speed, clearly a drill that most or all of SHIELD has rehearsed in case of such an event, but though the proceedings are rather calmly borne out, something nags at him that he can't quite put his finger on, some worry present in the rearmost quarters of his mind.

It's not until Hansel is helping the last load of soldiers into their transport, one foot on the bumper and the blockade deserted, that he realizes that Maria was not in the group that came down the path with Dempsey - that he has not, in fact, heard her on the comms for quite some time now. 

Panic surges up his spine like ice, and he mounts the bumper of the Humvee to bellow into the back of the cargo bay, "Has anyone seen AD Hill?" But his only reward is a chorus of no's and shaken heads; Sitwell, in the front seat of the Humvee, has just enough time to twist in place and call after Hansel before the witch hunter is back on the ground and sprinting for the blockade. Doyle catches up to him before he can cross it, gloved hand tangling in his leather sleeve enough to foul Hansel's momentum, and Hansel nearly decks him across the mouth for it; the Sergeant ducks the fist, but grabs Hansel by the webbing of his shotgun's sling, a more secure grip and one less easily broken. "Kuhn, woah, where in hell -"

"AD Hill is _still inside,_ " snarls Hansel, pointing back towards the facility, as still and dark as it was before, only now there is more blood on the trampled path cut in the snow. 

"Yeah, inside a fucking _contaminated area!_ " Doyle growls back, looking Hansel steadily in the eye; it's a feat few men could accomplish, given the raging fires of hell Hansel knows are burning behind his blue gaze. He's backed greater men than Doyle with that look, and that the sergeant bulls right on through it is actually rather impressive. "Just what do you think you're going to _do,_ run in there, get infected yourself and die from exposure?" 

"I haff to _try,_ " Hansel grits out, his jaw set and his teeth grinding together, accent thickening against his own will. "SHIELD vill not care if I do not come back out. But AD Hill is not _expendable._ " And oh, his sons will dispute the idea that no one would mind if Hansel disappeared and never returned, but if Doyle does not know who the Grimms are, Hansel is _not_ about to tell him. There's a certain hesitation in Doyle's face, though, an angular frowning of those dark brows that reminds Hansel ever more strongly of Will, especially given the flicker of old ghosts that shade across the sergeant's green eyes, a memory, a crack in Doyle's armor; the old hunter sees his opportunity and seizes it without shame, says only quietly, "Please," while Doyle is caught on the edge of indecision. 

There's a long, _long_ moment when Hansel thinks that he may have to kill this competent man for refusing to let him go back for Maria, and wouldn't _that_ be a terrible loss to SHIELD's ranks - but then Doyle pinches the bridge of his nose, pressing the pads of forefinger and thumb to the inner corners of his eyes, before lifting his head and looking back over his shoulder, at the idling Humvee with Sitwell gesturing questioningly from the window. "It's so fucked, you know that?" Doyle mutters under his breath, and Hansel cannot quite tell if the sergeant is speaking to him or to himself. "Everything is just so fucked." He sucks in a breath through his teeth, glances back at Hansel. "Just - just wait here a second, okay? Christ's sake, you can't just run back in there without any environmental gear, like you're goddamn Rambo -" 

"Who?" 

Doyle blinks at him, tilts his dark head like a confused bloodhound. "Seriously? You've never seen -? You know what, never mind. Just stand here for a minute, Kuhn. That's an order," Doyle adds, before he jogs back to the Humvee, closes the rear doors and thuds the bottom of his fist on the side of the vehicle, just like before. There's some shouting back and forth between him and Sitwell - apparently leaving two agents alone on the blockade of a prospective quarantine zone is _not_ within normal SHIELD protocols - but whatever Doyle says convinces Sitwell to throw the Humvee into gear, and as soon as the vehicle is trundling off down the narrow winding road to base camp, Doyle trots to one of the crates left behind off to one side of the blockade, tearing the damn thing open without much care or regard for the mess he causes. He holds up his trophy with a triumphant flourish once he finds it, though - a black plastic rig that Hansel can tentatively identify as a gas mask, after his long weeks training with SHIELD. When Doyle moves back over to him, the Delta soldier straps it on over the old hunter's head with a matter-of-fact, no nonense manner, tugging on the straps, giving Hansel the required instructions to get the damn thing to seal to his face. It's rather like being trapped inside a black plastic fishbowl once it's on, and Hansel spends several long seconds attempting to acclimate to the loss of his peripheral vision, swinging his head back and forth to accustom himself to the extra weight. 

This isn't going to be nearly as simple as he'd hoped.

Doyle taps on the plastic eye-lenses, which earns him a consternated look from Hansel, but most certainly centers his attention on the sergeant. "Look, we've got a couple Humvees left, and some medical supplies," says Doyle, hooking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate said items. "I'm gonna start up one of the vehicles and get a bag of whatever I can find, because chances are she's injured _and_ exposed to whatever's in there. Not waiting longer than twenty minutes for you, you understand? Twenty minutes and I bug out, soldier, with or without you," and he taps his wristwatch with one callused finger to underscore the point. 

" _Ja,_ I understand," says Hansel grimly, and Doyle pats him on the shoulder one last time before the witch hunter bolts for the facility.

xxxxx

The northern wing is made of the stuff of nightmares.

Even before the intrusion of modern soldiers, the wing had been eerie enough; it bears a strong resemblance to the rooms in which SHIELD had held him in the days before his freedom, white tile floors, white walls, white ceilings, all designed to be as sterile-looking and easy to clean as possible. Time has eroded away at the neat neutral paleness of it all, however - there are piles of dirt in the cracks and corners, smears of brown substances on some of the walls, and one of the rooms Hansel passes has a ragged rust-coloured stain etched into the tiles that would make a lesser man's gorge rise. 

The subtle hints of the past, however, are merely a mellow undertone of what has been wrought in the present. 

Before terribly long in the facility, Hansel is stepping over and around the bodies of Bravo Team. Bravo Three is slumped against a wall, having blown his own brains out across the wall and much of the hallway, his expression still frozen in a deathmask of pure, unadulterated terror Hansel has heretofore only seen on the faces of small children. There are footprints tracking through the blood and brain matter, though, small footprints, measured and deliberate; Hansel, squelching a surge of hope in his chest, follows them, peering around every corner as he goes, careful so as not to suffer the same fate as Dempsey's company.

Some suited agents, their forms contorted unnaturally where they lay on the floor, white shirts and black ties a start contrast against the scarlet blooming on the cloth and across the floor; the bodies of two more Bravos, Five and Two, collapsed at the bases of two opposing walls, from the looks of their mutual wounds having killed each other in a hail of gunfire. Bravo Six he finds sprawled spread-eagle on the floor of a tiled room, shot in the back with enough bullets to pulp the meat of his corpse even through his Kevlar, and Four is not far from him, her small, still body curled in one corner in a pool of her own blood, her eyes glazed over and her throat cut. A bloody knife, a KA-BAR if Hansel doesn't miss his guess, sits alone on the tile between them, far enough away from either Six or Four that he cannot tell if she was murdered with it, or took her own life instead. 

Hansel is standing over the knife, wondering where Bravo One is, when he hears the gunshots, two in quick succession, somewhere further back in the wing. He's back in the halls in two heartbeats, moving faster than before towards the noise, stepping in silence and leaving red bootprints in his wake.

He finds Maria in a T-intersection, fallen mostly upright against a wall with her legs splayed out in front of her, a freshly shot Bravo One collapsed in the hallway before her; he's thoroughly dead, from the cavity at the back of his skull caused by a hollowpoint exit wound, but he's still bleeding, the red tide still flowing outward from his fallen shape. Her sidearm is still in her right hand, but her arm is limp at her side, fingers only loosely clutched around the grip and the back of her hand against the tile; her left palm, to contrast, is cradling her belly, blood the color of good sherry flowing slowly out between her fingers. Her head lolls downward as she stares at the wound, teal eyes narrowed in suspicion at it, as if she simply cannot believe that _anyone,_ much less one of her own soldiers, had the big brass balls to actually _shoot her._ The expression is so true to Maria Hill's warrior soul that Hansel would laugh in hysterical relief, if he thought he could spare the luxury.

It is arguably one of the dumbest moments of his life when Hansel rushes forward, stepping over the body of Bravo One, so relieved to see that she's breathing that he doesn't even consider that she might mistake him for a hostile. 

She's still shockingly quick, still almost nails him dead in his center of mass, except that he sees the movement of her arm and jukes quickly to the side to compensate, slamming his own shoulder into the wall of the corridor; the bullet goes wide, the chamber clicks on empty, and he sprints to her side and has to wrestle with her for control of the weapon, Maria screaming incoherently as she tries to brain him with the butt of the pistol, the pupils of her eyes reduced to tiny pinpricks in her pale, taut face. At some point, Hansel realizes that he himself is screaming back, but that he's lost his hold on the English language - it's all coming out in harsh, sharp-edged German, curses and praises and prayers to a God that Hansel hasn't believed in since he was eight years old, nonsense, most of it, fragments he can no longer hold back. 

Maria, distressingly, does not have much strength left to fight him for long, and he pries her trembling fingers free of the grip one at a time, pulls her impulsively into his frame, trapping her arms against her sides to keep her from trying to hit him. She hisses in pain - he must have jostled the wound - but the fight begins to leach out of her as soon as he does it, and her temple comes to rest against his shoulder; he hears her mumble his name, like she isn't sure she can believe _that_ , either, and then all at once goes limp against him, a ragdoll in his arms. 

There's a moment of white, blinding panic clawing up his spine, fear like he has never known clenching its frozen fist around his heart, before Hansel gets a fucking _grip_ on himself and goes to work. 

First things first: the wound. Hansel lays Maria out on the cold, blood-spattered tile, as much to give him a moment to think as to get a better look at the gunshot; he went through a basic battlefield first-aid course during the events of his assessment, but most of the knowledge has fled him, threatens to make his hands shake and his mind freeze. In the end, he defaults to what he's done in the past, when Gretel has been wounded on the hunt - he tears the sleeve from Maria's uniform, folds it up, and (apologizing under his breath for the invasion, because if she were awake for this she would tear his face off) unzips her uniform enough to stuff the pad of fabric against the wound. It's not enough pressure on the injury to consider moving her, but then Hansel rips straps from the the webbed harness off of Bravo One's cooling body and cinches them over the pad, a less than elegant, but effective solution. It'll hold, at least as far as the Humvee and the road to the base camp. 

Hansel takes a deep breath, allows his eyes to fall closed for just a moment in the kind of prayer he doesn't even dare to put words to, and scoops Maria up off the floor. 

xxxxx

Doyle ends up waiting twenty-seven minutes for them. Hansel is kind enough not to point this out.

The Delta soldier has the Humvee idling as promised, the back doors wide open and a duffel back of supplies sitting in the back of the bay; he's smoking a cigarette when Hansel comes trotting around the corner of the blockade, Maria in a princess-carry that she would slap him silly for if she were conscious, and the first words out of Doyle's mouth are "Oh, _fuck me._ " He throws the cig away, sprints to meet Hansel halfway, and between the two of them they manhandle her into the back of the Humvee, get her laid out alongside the duffel as best they can. 

The sergeant pulls the straps upwards with a finger, peeks underneath the webbing at the wound, but the folded sleeve, and much of Maria's surrounding uniform, are already turning dark with the seep of blood. He lets the straps snap back down after only a momentary glimpse. "Jesus Christ. You know that base camp is a thirty-minute drive from here, right?" he says, turning his head to look Hansel in the eye, but the old hunter merely stands there and stares at him with a solemn, intense expression, a _you'd better impress me, boy_ expression; Doyle swallows, rubs hard at his scalp with the gloved palms of his hands, and says, " _Fuck._ I can make it in twenty. Take your coat off, would you? Wrap her up, keep her warm, try and stave off the shock. And for the love of whatever God you believe in, Kuhn, cross your fingers we make it in time." Doyle is shooing Hansel into the back of the Humvee as he says it, slams the doors behind him to sprint around for the driver's side door, and Hansel, powerless to do anything else, divests himself of his shotgun and its sling, slides his coat off his shoulders, and wraps Maria up in it as the sergeant advised. 

Doyle takes off like he's being chased by all the powers of hell, and when the sudden movement of the vehicle sends Hansel's back to slam into the sidewall of the Humvee's hull, Maria whimpers and twists, little noises of pain that reverberate in Hansel's bones. The only reason she doesn't crack her head open is because Hansel has her in his arms, wrapped tight and pressed to his chest, her temple against his shoulder and the cool skin of her forehead resting against the side of his neck. 

He has never been so afraid for the sake of anyone else, not even Gretel, in his entire life. 

("And you don't recall _anything_ that might have been said or done in the back of the Humvee, while you were driving?" Coulson will ask later, staring Doyle in the eye, clearly unimpressed with the sergeant and certain that he is not telling the entire truth. Doyle himself merely snorts and leans back in his chair, one dark brow cocked over those khaki-green eyes. 

"With all due respect, sir, are you shittin' me? I was doing one-twenty down a gravel _goat trail_ in a Humvee with Assistant Director Hill bleeding out in the back. You think I had time to pay attention to anything other than _not_ fishtailing off the road and falling two miles straight down?"

He's lying, of course, lying through his goddamn _teeth_ , but no one ever has to know that. It wouldn't be the first time he's been court-martialed, after all.

Doyle can't ever pay enough to balance out the sins of his past, but he can try to make up for them a little, by ensuring that Hansel and Maria have a future.)

Hansel cradles Maria against him like a precious treasure, rests his cheek against her hair, for just a moment allowing himself this weakness, to be close to her, to admit that he is _terrified_ and there is nothing he can do but sit there and be powerless; there is a good chance - better than good, from the look on Doyle's face when he peered at Maria's wound - that she will never make it to the base camp, that she will die in his arms right here and he will never know what could have been, what _should_ have been if he hadn't been such a bloody _coward_ in going about things - 

The Humvee hits a pothole, and they both jolt upwards for half a heartbeat before hitting the floor of the cargo bay again. Maria moans from the motion, and Hansel lifts his head, sees her eyelashes fluttering dark against her white cheeks, feels one of her arms struggling feebly to break free of his coat. He parts his lapels for her, and she tangles her pale, cold fingers in the front of his uniform, needing some sort of anchor, some hold on the world even though life itself is slipping right through her fingers. She's stronger than he gives her credit for, _so_ much stronger than he ever knew, her mettle tested and true; where a lesser woman would give in to oblivion, she claws her way towards consciousness, cracks her teal eyes, wets her dry lips with the tip of an equally dry tongue as if she means to speak. 

"Shhh, Fraulein Hill," Hansel says low and calm, adjusting his hold on her so she's a bit more comfortable. He's a furnace in the back of the Humvee, heat radiating off of him from the run to the blockade and the adrenaline, but she's cold, so very cold. "Hyu haff been shot. Save hyur strength."

She actually manages a low, weak chuckle at that, fingers flexing in his uniform. "I'm dying here, Hansel. The least you can do is call me Maria."

"Hyu are _not_ dying," he returns ferociously, and his voice trembles more than he would have liked to ever admit was possible from him; he's surprised to find that he's shaking all over when her hand lifts from the front of his uniform to the roughness of his jaw, the cold stillness of her fingers a sharp contrast to the tremor of his frame. Her smile is beatific, her eyes remarkably clear; she will not remember this later, will not remember her words or his actions, but in the moment she is present and coherent and steady, a solemn presence when it seems like the very earth is shattering beneath Hansel's feet. 

"No, it's okay. I'm fine with this. Better here than alone, somewhere." She brushes the pad of her thumb across his chin, and he can't help himself when he leans into that feather-soft touch, and he hates himself for it too, for being so greedy with what might be her last moments on earth. "Can I ask you a question, Hansel?" 

He swallows hard, shuts his eyes for just a moment, to ward away the sting of tears. "Anything." 

"Am I too difficult?" She says it like a little girl lost, tremulous and afraid, and this is it, this is the moment where Hansel realizes for the first time just how absolutely _fucked_ he is when it comes to Maria; that he is lost and has been lost and will be lost, forever, because she is his lodestar and his touchstone and the rock upon which he has built his church, and without her he has no direction and nowhere to go, no goal to achieve, no greatness for which to strive. She brought him out of the darkness, out of the endless torment of the curse, hauled him back up into the light kicking and screaming, and he has never properly thanked her for it, never sat her down and told her how grateful he is for one sweet, foolish kiss, freely given with no idea of its consequences; and he wants to tell her now that if she is difficult, it is because she is the fist shaken at the heavens, she is the defiance spit in the eye of the gods, she is lightning and ash and bone and dust, a warrior-queen over a court that doesn't deserve her affections. If life is a game she is a chessboard where all the panels are black, and if life is a song she is a call to war, the drumbeat of the bloodied earth, the clash and clamor of steel on steel; if life is a dance, she is something slow and sinful, something that is only danced behind closed doors and never in polite company. She is the sun and the moon and the stars burning in the firmament, a force of nature, something unattainable yet must always be reckoned with, unable to be ignored, only evaded or defied. She is beauty and grace and hatred and blood and battle, courage and quickness and a many-threaded strength of will like Damascus steel. 

She is the smile that well-armed men back away from slowly, and the moment found between darkness and light, when all things at last become equal. 

But Hansel does not have the words, does not have the soul of a poet to frame her in loveliness as she deserves to be seen; instead he only says, his voice ragged and low and rough, tears streaking down his careworn cheeks, "Hyu are a challenge, Maria - but not one meant to be conquered." 

"I might like to be conquered, just once," she whispers, soft as silk, and then her cold hand is in his hair, and she drags his mouth down against hers. 

God help him, he shouldn't cherish this so much, shouldn't relish every second of it the way he does - she's dying, she _can't_ be thinking clearly, and how does this make him any better than the men who took advantage of him, of his sister in her helplessness? - but he _aches_ for it in ways he can't adequately describe, stores away every moment in the depths of his soul, etches them in his bones, a balm against harsher days, because the harsher days will always come. She presses up into him with what meager strength she has remaining, and he kisses her like he's drowning and the breath of life is in her mouth, like if he stops kissing her he will vanish, that everything he was and ever would be will simply wink out of existence. He breaks away only to allow her to breathe, and she strokes his cheek with her cool, callus-rough palm when he does it, so he puts his fingers over hers and leans heavily into her hand, like a cat seeking affection from its chosen human; his tears drift from his face to land on her cheeks, and she squints and makes a face, and mumbles about how that tickles, snuggling her face down into the crook of his neck where it meets his shoulder, so _trusting_ , so openly kind that it makes his heart seize in his chest. 

He cradles her like that all the way to the base camp, his face buried in her hair, not even lifting his head when Doyle raises Sitwell on the Humvee's CB, demanding that somebody get the Sikorsky started up and ready to airlift them all out, because he's coming in hot and will personally run down anyone who gets in his way.


	9. Fallout

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lateness, the holidays ate me. Any incoherency in the narrative can be blamed on my beta not catching it. One line in here is blatantly stolen from GalahadsGurl.
> 
> Minor note here on the usage of military time - in the US military, the NATO alphabet code Juliet is used to signify the local time (in this case, 0200 Juliet) as opposed to a specific time zone, such as Zulu (which is equal to GMT). 
> 
> Some liberties have been taken with details, but I really did try as hard as I could to make things realistic. :P Timeline, for those who have forgotten, is February 1997.

Once upon a time, long ago - when Hansel was a boy in truth and not just in name, in that brief period of innocence before the woods and the witch and being catapulted into a life fueled by blood and gunpowder - he had sometimes gone wandering (not far) into the Black Forest, just to sit and admire the variegated beauties of nature; even then, he was a child given to stillness and quiet observation, his gaze keenly appreciative of such tiny details as the dew collecting on the needles of the firs, the flash of feather of the birds as they sang, the swish and purl of the hides of deer as they stepped lightly through the foliage. If he was still enough and quiet enough, the deer would flow around him where he sat, grazing touching-close, completely unconcerned with his presence so long as he did not move a muscle.

Once, on his way back to the house, he crossed paths with a old and canny wolf - hoary and huge, pale grey, darker silver badges of honor stippled on his shoulders and his eyes a vivid yellow. The wolf did not approach, and Hansel did not move, did not hardly dare to breathe; the creature, disinterested in the ways of foolish little boys, eventually left with nary a sound, melting into the trees as if he had never been.

Not long after that, he had come across a half-fledged sparrow floundering at the base of a tree, quietly but determinedly attempting to scale the trunk with little other than flaps of its still-downy wings and scrabblings of its tiny claws. Thinking of the wolf, of how such a little thing would make an easy snack for such an enormous beast, Hansel had rushed forward and scooped it up in his bare hands; it squeaked and thrashed under his fingers until he pinned its limbs to its sides, whereupon it promptly bit him twice as hard as it could, beady black eyes staring up at him imperiously. It was clear to Hansel that the tiny bird, fragile as it was, did not _want_ to be helped, even if it desperately needed it; he could feel its heartbeat racing under his fingertips, could trace the lines of its hollow bones, so light, so _delicate_ that he knew if he held too hard, he would crush it under his hands, all unwitting.

But even weak as it was, even floundering in the leaf-litter and trapped in his hands, it still held the defiance in its frail little form to bite at him, to squeak and flail, to fight him every step of the way.

That day two centuries and more past, he had tucked the little sparrow in his shirt and climbed the tree, to release it back into its nest with only scratches and skinned palms for his trouble.

This day in the present, staring at the pale, near-lifeless form of Maria Hill on the floor of the helicopter as it wings determinedly across the open expanse, the grown man that that boy has become thinks of that stubborn little sparrow, and hopes against hope that Maria Hill bears a similar fortitude of spirit in her slender frame.

God bless Sergeant James Doyle; Hansel will say a prayer for that steady-hearted man every day for the rest of his life, because if not for him, Maria would never have had a chance. The helicopter is already spinning up its rotors when the Humvee screams onto the tarmac - Hansel briefly sees a suited blonde woman in the pilot's seat, headset over her ears and her tie yanked loose - and then Doyle has the vehicle parked and is running to throw open the rear doors, his face a mask of focused intent. The explosion of noise is almost overwhelming, shouting sourced from every direction and the _whump-whump-whump_ of the Sikorsky's rotors as much felt in his bones as heard, but Hansel's feet are steady and his arms strong as he bears Maria out of the Humvee, across the tarmac, up into the chopper. Two of SHIELD's medical officers are waiting for them inside the cramped interior - bare metal clanks under his feet as he steps up onto the floor of the chopper - and then Doyle is throwing the bag of medical supplies up after him, clambering inside seconds afterward.

They're in the air before Doyle even hauls the door closed.

There's a moment where Hansel is forced to adjust to the sensation of the floor moving under his boots - a Sikorsky is nothing _remotely_ similar to a Quinjet in terms of stability - but he keeps his feet and keeps his hold on Maria, at least until the medical officers pry her loose of his arms, one cold, white finger at a time. His mind knows that her best chance lies with skilled, timely care at the hands of the medics, but his body refuses to cooperate for long seconds, until all at once they lift her weight from him and he sags against the side of the chopper; Doyle has to physically haul him to the rear of the craft by his shirt when the medics bear her down to the sheetmetal floor, needing the room to work, her head lolling, her lips white and her eyes shut, his coat a puddle of black leather around and beneath her. The medics don't bother to remove it while they tend to her, more important priorities immediately before them, but it looks uncomfortably like she is sinking into a pool of black blood. The image is not helped by Maria's own flow of red from her belly, or the bloodstains on the medics' forearms, tracking all the way up to their elbows.

The airlift to the closest hospital seems like it takes an eternity, all of which Hansel must spend to the aft of the helicopter, one of Doyle's arms slanted across his chest to keep him from rushing forward, Hansel's back to the stripped inner hull of the craft and the tips of his fingers bruising into his own thighs.

It's not a gentle landing. The SHIELD pilot sets the helicopter down hard on the roof, less interested in textbook landings than in getting her Assistant Director into surgery as fast as possible, and in seconds Doyle's thrown open the doors and the medical officers have Maria lifted up between them, rushing to meet the team that the Austrian hospital has deployed to the rooftop, a metal gurney leading the crowd of nurses and doctors like the prow of a ship. It's all a tangle of shouting from there, cobbled English and German (Doyle's accent is _truly_ horrific) and one of the medical officers speaks a little rushed Slovene, but the Austrian team works as a singular unit, efficient and swift, taking over the care of Maria Hill as inexorably as the tide. They rush her off the rooftop with admirable hustle, the medics and Sergeant Doyle keeping pace with long, effortless strides.

Soon enough, the rooftop is next to deserted. A handful of the hospital's security officers are to the front of the Sikorsky, chatting with the blonde pilot in broken English and mangled German, the SHIELD agent gesticulating wildly as she tries to explain that with AD Hill dying in the back of her chopper, there really hadn't been any _time_ for proper flight clearance. None of them are paying any attention whatsoever to Hansel, in the bay of the chopper staring down at the crumpled shape of the black coat at his feet; Maria's blood still pools in the fabric of the lining, drips and slides across the leather, and when Hansel stoops to pick it up the flood that falls from inside the coat is enough to make his gorge rise.

Loath to leave it behind even sticky and dark with Maria's blood, he balls up the leather, sticks it under one arm, and pads for the stairs down into the hospital proper. None of the security personnel, too focused on the blonde SHIELD agent, even call after him.

It seems pointless, to attempt to locate Maria in the bustle of a working hospital. Wherever she is, Hansel is sure, she is receiving the best care possible; with any luck, she is already in surgery, the talented hands of Austrian doctors working to sew her back up again, to make right what has been wronged. Hansel finds himself unexpectedly extraneous, now - there is no point in his presence here, useless to those around him, harmful, even, if one takes into account that every nurse who crosses his path double-takes at seeing a stern-faced soldier in an American uniform, his clothes spattered with blood right down to the tops of his black boots, red flecks matting in his hair alongside white brick-dust and the melted remnants of snow. It takes three such encounters in the corridor, the nurses staring openly at the spectre he represents, before Hansel has the presence of mind to flee into the first bathroom he comes across, in dire need of a moment alone, to allow his brain to process.

He rinses out the coat in the sink while he tries desperately not to think, sleeves rolled up past his elbow and massaging the scarlet stains out of the lining; it's hardly the best care for a leather coat, but it's something to do, and Hansel can no longer stand the stench of Maria's blood soaked into the fabric, seeping into the thread, threatening to become as much a part of the coat as the stitches that hold it together. Once it is as clean as he can force it to be, he lays it out along the counter and puts both dripping palms against the edge, the tile cutting dully into his skin. The pain is uncomplicated and without ulterior motive, and just the anchor-point that Hansel needs to slowly begin to rebuild his sense of calm.

His image in the mirror is exactly as frightening as he thought it might be. No wonder the nurses flee from him, even five thousand miles away from base.

Hansel begins to feel more like himself, once he's run his head under the faucet a bit and scrubbed the blood and dust and snowmelt from his scalp; he is still refusing to think, refusing to contemplate Maria and where she is and what is being done to her, but the thoughts are beginning to press in at the edges of his mind, a horde of unwelcome concepts crowding at the doors and tapping on the windows. Eventually, he will have to confront them, get them in order. It seems best to attempt to do so _now,_ in that rare window of opportunity where he is stranded in a strange place with no handlers and no one to watch him, before SHIELD can establish a significant presence in the hospital and surrounding areas; Sitwell is no doubt making calls from the base camp in the mountains, already attempting to ship in more agents from their overseas posts, to make up for the lack of personnel in the immediate locale. The medical officers and Doyle won't dare stray far from Maria, not now when she is most in need of protection, loath as she is at all times to accept any form of help.

They won't be thinking of Hansel, of where he has gotten off to, for a little time yet. When they do, they will want documentation, answers to questions that he can't bear to contemplate yet. Best to make the most of the time he has been given.

A hospital bathroom seems like a terrible place for a meltdown, however, so he squeezes as much of the water out of the leather coat as he can, throws it over one shoulder, and heads for the ground floor. The tails of his coat, trailing across his chest, are dark enough and wide enough to cover most of the blood-splatter; the purposeful walk for the lobby doors takes care of much of the rest, and while eyes follow him as he exits the hospital, no one calls out, and no one attempts to stop him. The night air is chill and bracing, sluicing through his lungs, making him feel clean; the burn in his thighs is welcome as he begins to walk down the sides of the streets, the hospital's host city a sizable township. At first, he decides he will only walk, left alone with his thoughts in the freezing February air, but two blocks down and three over from the hospital, he is presented with a much more palatable option.

When Hansel slaps Will's Amex Black facedown on the countertop and asks in perfect German for the man to give him vodka and leave the bottle, the bartender takes one look at the expression on his face and doesn't even _think_ about carding him.

xxxxx

Doyle finds him like that hours later, long after sundown, the leather coat draped across the back of his barstool, one hand in his blonde hair, tugging at the roots so hard he's fit to pull it out in hanks, and nursing his second bottle of Monopolowa. He's not even bothering to use a glass anymore.

The sergeant doesn't say a word as he legs up onto the stool next to Hansel's, leaned forward with his elbows on the bartop, head tipped forward and jaw unhappily set. Hansel has worked his way up to a pleasant, mellow buzz by now, but the alcohol doesn't impact his powers of observation much; he can feel the Delta soldier contemplating his profile for several long minutes, but doesn't acknowledge his presence, doesn't even flicker his robin's-egg eyes sideways to glance at Doyle's tanned and careworn face.

It's Doyle that finally breaks the silence, sitting up straight on his stool and glancing away, like speaking pains him. "She's out of surgery," he notes low, in English, which is ironically the language they are the least likely to be eavesdropped upon in this particular bar; the other patrons, what few there are, speak German almost exclusively, and they've been giving the blonde soldier at the bar a _very_ wide berth. "Stable, in a private room. No permanent damage, but AD Hill isn't going on any field missions for a while. Docs say she's got a better than eighty percent chance at a full recovery, assuming that aerosol crap doesn't prove contagious." He pauses, and Hansel sees the movement out of the corner of his eye as Doyle swivels his head back to glance at him, but the witch hunter does not respond, except to lift the vodka bottle once more to his lips. "You probably saved her life."

 _She wouldn't have been there at Dornröschen, if not for me._ It begs to be said, pushes at the insides of his lips like a physical thing, but Doyle isn't cleared to know that, and it's rather irrelevant after the fact anyway; if not her, then someone else would have been shot, and he feels as if he should be guilty for _not_ feeling guilty for the lives of the good men and women who _died_ in that snow-covered facility. The truth, however, is that they don't matter, not to Hansel; Maria matters, and what happens to her matters, but he has fought and killed and sometimes outright murdered too many times in his life to feel anything for the agents and soldiers killed this day. Killed _pointlessly_ , more's the pity.

(Later, Maria herself will bear that guilt, the blood of the dead washing over her hands, her soul, taking responsibility for the lives wasted with so little to show for it - but Hansel feels nothing, not then and not ever, and wonders if that makes him more of a monster than the things he used to kill, that he is so inured to death and sin that it no longer bothers him.

He wonders what his sons would think of him, if they knew how _empty_ and shriveled his heart really is - how he hoards compassion like it is a limited resource yet spends all of it on a woman who barely knows who he is, leaving none left for the faceless rank and file of the soldiers around him.

A good man would think, _None of them would have been there, if not for me._ But Hansel has not been a good man for a very long time.)

He doesn't say anything, sets the bottle down, places both palms on the bartop and stares at the backs of his hands, like if he ignores Doyle for long enough, the problem that the other soldier represents will simply go away.

"You've got some pretty sharp instincts for battlefield medicine, for a dude that carries a shotgun," allows Doyle, leaning back a bit further away from the bar, rolling his shoulders in an absent attempt to stretch the muscles of his back. "Where'd you learn?"

Hansel does not wish to discuss this, but it is becoming slowly evident to him that the manifestation of his troubles will not vanish at his whims; he considers getting up and leaving, but cannot think of anywhere at all to go but the hospital, and by now it is doubtless flooded with men and women in sharp black suits with sharp black expressions and sharp black souls. He isn't quite ready for that yet, to face down their stares, both accusatory and pitying. "In battle, mostly. My sister taught me," and his heart squeezes at the thought of Gretel with clever fingers sewing up his wounds by candlelight, smirking crookedly at him when he hisses in a breath in pain - Gretel laying in a bed on an American base, interred aboveground, a funeral in state for a wake that will never end. Gretel, for whom he came to the facility in the mountains, and for whom he has not spared a single thought since Maria did not come back with Dempsey's group, puffing in the snow. A single drop of guilt-thawed ice slides improbably up his spine, pools at the nape of his neck.

Doyle, blessedly, does not notice, though he does lift a hand to beckon over the bartender. "She teach you your English, too?"

" _Nein._ There vas -" He stumbles over the descriptor, uncertain how much to betray to Doyle, how much he can afford to tell this half-stranger, whom he will most likely never see again. "A job. In London," he clarifies, peering down into the bottom of his Monopolowa.

Doyle's dark brows tick upwards over those khaki eyes. "Ah. I, uh, I try to _avoid_ London."

(He orders whiskey, when the bartender trundles over; Hansel asks him idly, reminded once more of Will, "Do hyu drink Glenlivet?" and Doyle snorts inelegantly and eyes him over his glass, scoffing.

"Glenlivet's for pussies. Give me the Jack any day.")

"What happened in London?" asks Hansel, because he is curious against all sense of propriety; perhaps the vodka is finally working its devious ways upon him, loosening his tonge and making lax his self-control. Doyle, however, merely flashes a tight smile and shakes his head, lifting his left hand to rub at his eyebrow and give him an excuse to delay the answer. Hansel can see the full relief of the crimson knife tattooed on the inside of his forearm, now - can even see the bandage, bright green, wrapped around the inside of his elbow, the tear in his sleeve where an overenthusiastic tug has ripped the fabric. It's already starting to fray and unravel at the edges.

"You're not cleared high enough to know that, soldier," grins the younger man with a cheer that Hansel can tell that he does not feel, clapping him on the shoulder before he shotguns the rest of his whiskey, then reaches for Hansel's vodka to refill the tumbler. There's a space in the silence that comes afterward for Doyle to make another comment, to attempt to lighten the mood or change the subject, but neither he nor Hansel seems inclined to take the opportunity; when Doyle is done pouring his shot, the clear liquer tainted a pale orange from whiskey residue, Hansel takes the bottle back and swallows down a mouthful of vodka. He can't even feel the burn of it anymore as it slides down his throat, and wonders if this is symbolic of his life, or merely problematic of his present situation.

They're most of the way through the Monopolowa, trading the bottle back and forth in silence, before Hansel finds the coordination to speak again, his accent thick in his throat, blocking his air like a thing with corporeal form. "Vhy deed hyu help me?"

"Hmm?" murmurs Doyle in his throat, chin propped up in one half-gloved palm; he affects an appearance of being dulled by drink, sleepy and well on his way to trashed, but when he cuts his green eyes to Hansel's, they are clear as polished glass and twice as sharp.

"At Dorn- at the facility," and it really takes _effort_ to make that particular F-word word come out correctly, in the pertinent language and without any extra vowels or consonants, but the attempt is worth it no matter how clumsy, because Hansel _knows better_ than to blurt out sensitive information, he really does, but he is a hunter, not a spy. He wasn't made for all this cloak and dagger bullshit, and he knows it. "Hyu stopped, hyu helped me. Hyu deed not haff to," and by now Doyle is avoiding his gaze, peering into the bottom of his tumbler, and Hansel knows that he has come across something important, though _why_ it is important, he is having some difficulty fathoming. "So vhy?"

Doyle sits there for several long moments, carefully looking at nothing, still and calm as ocean waters, smooth at the surface but roiling and chaotic far beneath; eventually, though, he exhales hard and leans forward enough to pull his wallet from his back pocket, flips it open with a callused thumb, and sets it on the bartop between them, where Hansel can see. It's a decent leather wallet, wrinkled at the folds and beginning to crack in one corner, but placed at its center like a precious pearl in an otherwise worthless clamshell is a tattered photograph, peeling at the edges, lovingly repaired more times than Hansel cares to count, with Doyle (smiling) looking down at a woman (not smiling) with auburn hair and large, dark eyes, with the sort of fearsome, decidedly unimpressed look on her face that Hansel has previously only seen on Maria Hill. Granted, the woman in the photograph has entire degrees of magnitude to go before she can approach the ferocity implicit in a single one of the Left Hand of God's glances, but she's definitely gotten a good start. As best Hansel can tell, if the photograph had been one of a series, in the next slide the good sergeant would be getting the smile slapped right off of his face. He almost wonders what it was the Doyle dared to say to a woman of such fierce constitution.

She must not be _entirely_ wroth with the sergeant, however, because she has one arm lifted up and slung over his shoulder as if about to pull him down for a kiss, and his hand rests lightly at the curve of her hip. But Doyle's noticeably younger in this picture, paler, not as worn from the sun and not quite as bulky up around the shoulders; it couldn't have been taken recently.

Hansel glances across the divide at Doyle, but Doyle is staring at the photograph, his face full of regret, his voice low and just this side of broken. "You went back for AD Hill." He reaches across, snatches up the Monopolowa, and taking a page from Hansel's own book, takes a long swig directly from the bottle. When he's done, he wipes his mouth with the back of a hand, gestures at the wallet and its precious contents. "I wish every goddamn _day_ that I'd been stupid enough to go back for her. What else could I do?"

Something clicks in the back of Hansel's mind. "London?"

Doyle gives a shrug of one shoulder - Hansel knows the gesture well, neither a confirmation nor a denial, though that by itself is almost as good as a testimonial, given the context - and is not entirely surprised when the sergeant changes the subject entirely. "We ought to go back to the hospital, you know. SHIELD's people are already taking over security, they'll want to ask you some questions. Find out what happened."

Neither of them say what they are thinking, that it's going to take a little more than a couple interviews of weary, half-drunk soldiers to find out what happened at Dornröschen, but Hansel does not protest either, not when Doyle polishes off the bottle of vodka, pockets his wallet, and pushes away from the bartop. Hansel collects his coat, mostly dry now, but cannot bring himself to wear it on the journey back, even though it's begun to sleet, and he's dripping wet and shivering in his uniform before they've gone two blocks. Doyle fares little better, but the half-frozen rain at least has the benefit of darkening the blood on their uniforms to unrecognizable dark smears, where it does not wash out entirely.

Sleetstorm notwithstanding, it's a longer walk back to the hospital than it was away from it, as if his entire frame is resisting the idea of return, reluctant to know what he will find when he finally gets there.

xxxxx

The lobby is full of agents, when they return. Hansel recognizes handfuls of them from the Quinjet ride and the base camp, soldiers and suits both, a few even in plainclothes, seeded amongst the more obvious agents in order to calm the populace; the hour is late enough that SHIELD need not worry overmuch about civilians, but there's little point in drawing attention to themselves. By morning, all of the overt agent presence will have been replaced. Doyle, one of the heroes of the hour, is accosted by a ring of suits nearly the moment he steps into the lobby, and whatever his resistances to the assault of sleet and vodka, he is too slow to keep Hansel from slipping this latest of his leashes, the witch hunter stepping neatly to the side and breaking line of sight as quickly as possible. The trail of water he leaves, his feet squelching wetly inside of his boots, is soon obliterated by the cross-trails of others, and Hansel is certain to weave enough of a mazelike path through the hospital that he thinks even Gretel, the only other hunter in the world Hansel's equal, would be hard-pressed to find him again.

From there, it's a simple exercise to find Maria's room, though it doesn't quite go as he expects - he approaches the first nurse's station he runs across, and does not have to feign appearing somewhat lost, but though he comes away from the encounter successful, he's a little worse for the wear for it.

("Can I help you?" asks the woman seated at the station, her German crisp and melodious to his ears; he had forgotten the simple joys of conversing in his native tongue, in a language that he does not have to fight constantly to gain traction in.

"I'm trying to find Maria Hill. She should have just come out of surgery," says Hansel, smiling uncertainly; the nurse smiles back, briefly studying his face, his wet hair and soaked-through uniform, turning only to tap away at her keyboard, full of that certain brand of efficient grace that would have Jason googoo-eyed in moments, were he here to see her.

"Are you her husband?" she inquires kindly, and Hansel opens his mouth but nothing comes out; to say _yes_ would be a lie, and the kind of lie he hasn't the evidence to back up, at that, but at the same time he cannot bring himself to say _no_ , to deny the possibility, the desire there for the kind of deeper connection that it only takes a stranger a glance to see. The moment stretches on without Hansel able to say a word, his jaw slowly coming to click shamefully shut, and the nurse takes one look at his expression and takes pity on him, gives him the numbers to Maria's floor and the proper room on it.

He manages to thank her, but only just barely, shaken that he has betrayed himself so easily.

The next nurse's station he passes, he chugs down enough boiling-hot coffee to scald the inside of his throat.)

As soon as he steps off of the elevator onto Maria's floor, however, he can see why the nurse so easily gave him the information; if the lobby had been heavily populated with SHIELD agents, Maria's floor is positively _infested_ with them, and they all turn to stare at him the moment he exits the elevator doors. What was quite probably a loud cacophony of ambient chatter ceases immediately when they see him, and dozens of sets of eyes bore into him like they can divine the events at Dornröschen simply by reading them in the lines of his bones, but few of the agents are brave enough to meet his gaze. When it becomes clear that none of them have either the orders or the inclination to keep him from seeking out the Assistant Director, Hansel strides forward and lets the gossiping whispers resume, concerned only with counting off the rooms as he passes.

There's a trio of soldiers standing guard outside Maria's room, and two of them rise from their positions against the wall with weapons already drawn, more than ready to ward away a wet witch hunter from their Assistant Director; the third agent, however, is the more senior of the medical officers that had tended to Maria on the helicopter, the blood washed clean from her hands and forearms, but staining the cuffs of her sleeves a disconcerting shade of rust-brown. She waves him through, turning what could have been a nasty confrontation into an easy one, and he nods his head in the kind of gratitude he will never be able to adequately express.

Hansel has never seen a quarantine tent before this day, but he will never forget it afterward.

From what he can see through the plastic sheeting, Maria Hill lies on her gurney with her hair loose and dark around her white face, needle shoved into her arm and hand to give her fluids and drugs and whatever other modern medicinal sorcery the doctors deem required to keep her on this side of the land of the living; machines crowd under the plastic tent, towering over the little form in the bed and making her blurred shape seem ever smaller, ever tinier, the longer he stares at it.

The machines beep merrily in time with her pulse, though, and she's breathing easily under the shadow of the plastic tent, every lungful of air slow and deliberate, the lines of her form natural and relaxed - true sleep, then, and not merely unconsciousness, and the thought allows some previously unrealized tension in Hansel's chest to ease.

Though much of the private room's furniture has been removed to allow room for the machinery and quarantine tent, a single chair sits up against one wall, out of the way of any medical personnel attempting to reach Maria but undeniably present; Hansel sinks down into it as if he has not sat in years, draping the coat across the back, slumping back against the wall and allowing, just for a minute, his head to sag and his eyes to close. It's been nearly eleven hours since they first landed the Quinjet in Austria, at least five since the Sikorsky, and at last the strain is beginning to make itself felt in Hansel's frame, his muscles trembling, his body sore, as if by seeing that Maria is as well as can be expected, he has at last given himself permission to feel the aches and pains inherent in a mortal form.

The beeping of the heart monitor is almost like birdsong, and Hansel thinks on that long-ago sparrow and thanks whatever deity is listening, for watching over the agents of SHIELD.

"Specialist Kuhn?"

He startles awake at being addressed so close, comes up fighting, one hand automatically yanking his sidearm out of its holster, leaping up and forward to pin the man against the nearest wall by the front of his jacket; Hansel has the safety off, arm up and gun pointed before he's entirely conscious of his own actions, and though the suit with the pistol in his face looks suitably impressed at the witch hunter's reaction time, he also pointedly clears his throat and tips the barrel of the firearm away. " _Guten morgen,_ Specialist Kuhn. Would you mind letting me go? I would really rather not have to taze you."

Hansel releases him, holsters the gun with a mildly sheepish expression, and sits back down all in a rush as his knees threaten to give out, the hunter scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms. Ah, rookie mistake, falling asleep in unsecured territory; still, he doubts the man with the thinning hair and piercing blue eyes will be attempting to wake any more sleeping wolves any time soon. "It's Herr Kuhn," he mumbles, transferring one palm to the crick in his neck, using the motion to covertly check that Maria still sleeps peacefully, the beeping of her monitor steady and slow. His back is really going to start protesting, as soon as he can get some feeling back into it; his entire body feels like it's on pins and needles, the blood slowly flowing back into his limbs. " _Scheiße,_ what time is it?"

The agent, at least, looks unfazed and undeterred; he drags a folding chair from where it rests against the wall, invites himself to have a seat within arm's reach of Hansel. "Almost seven in the morning, local time."

"And -" Hansel stifles a yawn with some effort, attempting to covertly stretch his shoulders, "vat are hyu doing here at seven in the morning, local time, Agent ...?"

"Coulson," supplies the agent, with the sort of calm, mild tone that Hansel associates with a man negotiating a hostage situation. There's a suitcase against the wall, just inside of the door, and Coulson reaches for it as he says, "I'm here to debrief you. Given that this is an unsecured area and time is of the essence, we have a secondary method available." Inside the suitcase are sheaves and sheaves of white sheets imprinted with the SHIELD logo (even thousands of miles away from base, it seems that Hansel cannot outrun the paper trail) and while Coulson withdraws a handful of them, he keeps half for himself and hands the rest to Hansel, along with a pen from his suit jacket's inner pocket. This particular bit of paperwork seems tailored to Hansel in specific - his name, rank and serial number, all SHIELD issue, are already filled out at the top - but the neat, small type swims in front of his eyes at first, the large and unfamiliar English words just close enough to their German counterparts to frustrate him with their familiarity.

"And hyu want me to - to fill this out." Hansel eyes the agent across from him like the man has grown a second head; Coulson smiles tightly back at him.

"If you would. Answer the questions in your own words, and provide as much detail as you can remember. Once you've returned to base," and Hansel bridles a little at this, because if this narrow-shouldered agent with the bland smile thinks he's separating the witch hunter from AD Hill's side, he has another think coming, "you will be debriefed more thoroughly. This is mostly designed to extract as much as possible, while the memories are still fresh."

 _And to pinpoint any holes in the chain of events,_ Hansel thinks with a frown, sour-faced as he leafs through the paperwork, already pondering how very much he does _not_ want to describe for SHIELD's dissection how Maria Hill seized him by the hair and tried to suck the breath of life out of him through his mouth.

(It's only her right, of course, as she was the one who first gave it back to him, all those months ago - but he rather thinks that SHIELD knows too much about that incident for his comfort already.)

"Do you have any questions?" prompts Agent Coulson; behind him, the door to the room opens, and a trio of nurses in quarantine gear file in, thought from how they march directly past Hansel and the agent without so much as a sideways glance, he pegs them as SHIELD replacements almost immediately. (The other giveaway is their shoes - Hansel has spent an exorbitant amount of time in the medical wing back at base, and none of the nurses there wear black boots as they go on their rounds.) He watches them for several long seconds, until they mask themselves and slip through the plastic sheeting around Maria, quickly reduced to blurry white blobs. Only then does he turn his head back to address the agent.

"Are hyu going to sit there and watch me?" he says rather skeptically, and when Coulson's expression does not change, doesn't so much as _twitch_ , Hansel bites the inside of his cheek against his irritation. Rather than lash out at the agent, however - he _is_ only doing his job, after all - Hansel instead bends to the task at hand, glancing up every so often to track the movements of the nurses as they flit in and out of Maria's plastic tent, performing arcane medical tasks and speaking to one another in such long-winded jargon that they might as well have invented a new language entirely, simply for the delight of making his forehead crease. Coulson scribbles absently on his own set of papers - no doubt post-mission notes on Hansel and his attitude, his willingness to toe the line and bend to code.

He has enough spite in his frame, however, to write all of his responses to SHIELD's inquiries in a cramped, angular hand. In German.

Eventually, though, the complexities of the questions being asked get the better of his grasp on the written word, and he leans back against the chair, every line of him urging for rebellion. "Is this really necessary?"

Coulson doesn't even look up, elegant handwriting looping and scrawling across the page. "We require as much information as possible in order to accurately represent what happened at the facility, Herr Kuhn. I would appreciate your willing assistance in this endeavor." The way he says it, the exact phrasing and slight stress on the word _willing_ , makes Hansel wonder exactly what the small, mild-mannered agent has been _doing_ while Hansel has apparently been sleeping on the job; he suspects that someone he has interviewed has been less than entirely forthcoming, most likely Doyle, and the steely-eyed look Coulson gives him when he raises his head to look Hansel in the face seems to confirm it. It's an expression he knows well, though he's used to seeing it on a face that mirrors his own; it's Will's _I know you've been up to something, and just wait till I find out what it is_ face, most often seen when one of Hansel's younger sons have been out pranking, but before the metaphorical chickens have come home to roost.

This tells Hansel two very important things: that Coulson suspects that _something happened_ in the back of that Humvee, but has little evidence of it, and that whatever other sins Doyle may have committed, ratting out Hansel and Maria to SHIELD wasn't one of them.

Hansel immediately resolves to be as unhelpful as possible.

The next twenty minutes are an exercise in Coulson's saintlike patience, and while Hansel must give him credit (for dealing gracefully with an irascible German witch hunter determined to piss you off is no simple feat) at the same time Coulson's face grows harder and harder, and his voice gets steadier and steadier the more of a fuss Hansel makes. The pen runs out of ink, the questions are too confusing, the verbage of the inquiries is unclear; any excuse Hansel can find, he reaches for with both hands, until Agent Coulson is sitting across from him with blue eyes blazing, seeming on the verge of asking the nurses (still milling about, though as much to listen to the hilarity that is this conversation as to keep an eye on Maria) for a wooden spoon with which to smack Hansel across the ass for being intentionally obtuse.

"I truly, genuinely need you to cooperate with me on this, Herr Kuhn," says Agent Coulson, every word measured and careful, as though if he speaks too aggressively he will physically assault the witch hunter and wreck Maria's room in the process. He already has his off-hand in his pocket, no doubt gripping his taser, with the pen in his other hand held so tightly that it threatens to snap in half under the pressure from the pads of his fingers.

 _"Zur Hölle mit dir,"_ Hansel growls back at him, and he does not need to feign a certain level of upset, though perhaps he lets his words slur towards German a little more than he otherwise would. "How ken I _cooperate_ mit hyu if I do not understend hyur question?"

"It's a very simple question," says Coulson, tone patronizing, but his jaw is so tense that Hansel can almost see the muscles in his cheek twitching. "What part do you not understand?"

"These vords," and Hansel smacks the sheaf of paper with his free hand, hard enough to leave a crease across the crisp white hardcopy. "I do not - _vas ist_ -"

The agent makes a noise in his throat, a sound that would be 'aha!' on a lesser man, and holds his hand out for the paperwork. The timbre of his words are working their way back to friendly, but his expression is crossing into contempt. Agent Coulson has clearly had enough of Hansel's shenanigans. "I forgot that English is your second language. Would it be easier if I read it to you? Here," and Hansel has no choice but to hand the papers over. The agent squares the corners with his fingers, eyes Hansel one last time as if he expects some sort of prank from the witch hunter, and only then begins to read. "What it says, Herr Kuhn, is simply this: While you had AD Hill in your custody after her exposure to the hallucinogenic agent in the facility, did she say or do anything that would lead you to believe that she has been compromised?"

Hansel knows that word, _compromised._ It's appeared a few times in the psychological profiles of his sons, and with more frequency in SHIELD's arcane rulings - a catchall term for agents so mentally damaged as to be beyond all attempts at salvage, but the connotations shade into other implications too, more troubling implications, ones that make him hesitate to immediately answer. Unfounded attachments to other personnel, for example - unpredictable behavior, reactions outside of the established norm, an inability to function optimally that has nothing to do with injury and everything to do with an agent's mental state.

She shot at him in the hallway in the facility, of course, but that can be blamed on whatever mind-altering substance had been released into the air. Her words in the Humvee, her lips on his, are not so easily justified or explained away.

Hansel presses his lips together in a thin white line, weighs the risks, and makes one very deliberate decision: to lie. "No."

xxxxx

Coulson leaves, not long after that, suitcase in hand and doubtless bound to harass some other agent alive enough to be questioned as to the events at Dornröschen; Hansel would pity that faceless target if he had any compassion left in his frame to spare for it. As it is, with the help of an overly cheerful young man at the nurse's desk, he locates a phone and is shown all the correct prefixes for dialing internationally, and how to charge the call to Maria's room. Will is, understandably, a bit pissed to be answering his phone at just shy of 0200 Juliet, but Hansel utters the magical phrase "Fraulein Hill has been shot" and suddenly, all of his eldest son's gripings vanish into the ether.

"She _what?_ " There's some rustling on the other end of the line, and Hansel can picture it very clearly from the audio alone: William throwing back the covers, temporarily smothering Marishka, phone pinned in the crook of his shoulder while he rummages on the floor for a decent pair of pants. The mental image actually makes him smile a little bit, his first one in what feels like days. "Have Sitwell send me the details. We'll be wheels-up in twenty -" Marina makes a mumbled, sleepy statement, indistinct due to her distance from the handset, and Will checks himself. "- thirty minutes."

" _Nein, mein Adler,_ " sighs Hansel, rubbing one eye with the backs of his fingers. "Hyu stay on base, by the time hyu get here, it will only be to turn around and take her home. She is stable, but not yet awake."

He can hear the bed creaking as Will sits back down on the mattress, can begin to make out the worried edges of Marina's words as she inquires as to what has happened; from her tone, she's caught sight of Will's face, knows that this is no simple call. "I'd ask you to tell me what happened, but if the mission file's still active -"

"Hyu can ask her hyurself, when she comes home," Hansel says firmly; he is probably breaking a dozen or more SHIELD protocols simply by having made this call, but he cannot fathom allowing Will or Marishka to go on unknowing. Truthfully, he ought to have called them before now, but he had been too busy wallowing in his potential grief to remember that things such as telephones existed in the modern age. "I know it is against hyur nature, _Adler_ , but the best hyu can do is to prepare, and to wait." Beat. " _Or_ hyu can ask Jason to get hyu the files when they come in, but hyu deed not hear that from me."

Will chuckles weakly into the handset. "You're getting more devious with every passing day, Dad."

"Let us hope it is not enough to kill me," agrees Hansel. "Go back to bed if hyu can, tell hyur brothers in the morning."

"Like Marishka's going to let that happen. I hope you realize she's going to hold you personally responsible for this," notes Will, and this time Hansel can hear very clearly as Marina makes indignant noises over being talked about as if she weren't pressed up against Misha's naked back. Hansel covers his eyes with a hand, as if by doing so he can purge that particular image from his mind.

"I vill hunt that monster when I reach its territory," he replies, and can _almost_ hear the gears grinding in Will's brain as he attempts to translate that from Hansel-speak into modern English.

"It's crossing a _bridge_ these days, Dad. You cross that bridge when you come to it."

"My point still stands."

"We'll see you when you get home. Take care of Maria."

When the line goes dead, Hansel places the handset carefully on its cradle, contemplating the grid of numbers on the plastic phone and its accompanying laminated list of codes and prefixes within the hospital's network; it's a better option than thinking on Will's final words, which remind him of what he's done to obfuscate how _much_ he's taken care of her, and whether SHIELD wanted him to or not. He's still staring at the phone, head down and shoulders hunched, when one of the white-coated nurses from Maria's room arrives, knocking first on the wall to alert Hansel to his presence - clearly, what happened when he was startled by Coulson has already begun to spread along the SHIELD grapevine. When Hansel turns to the pony-tailed young woman and lifts his brows in prompting, though, he hears six words that he did not expect to come so soon, if ever.

"She's awake, and asking for you."

His heart in his throat, he follows her back along the maze of corridors into one of the prep rooms to the floor's sides; when he arrives, the other two SHIELD nurses are waiting, and Hansel is scrubbed in like he's being prepared for surgery, his bloodstained uniform top covered with temporary blue drapery that he would swear is made from paper towels - more to avoid cross-contamination than anything else, the nurses assure him, the process quick and admirably efficient. Once he's deemed suitable, they escort him back to Maria's room, their faces as stern as if they guard a crown prince, usher him under the plastic, and gather at the entrance to the room with their backs against the door, partly to give them some semblance of privacy, partly to keep an eye on Maria's condition. He suspects that this isn't quite proper agency protocol, either, but then, perhaps Maria's deathly glares are just as fearsome when she's laid up in bed as when she storms through the halls at HQ at the peak of health.

Hansel has been coached by the nurses not to touch anything, and he is careful not to, one hand making sure his mask stays secure over his mouth and nose, the other palm in one pocket. At the same time, though, he has to restrain a violent urge to rush forward and scoop Maria up in his arms, like how he held her in the Humvee, close to his heart and shivering against his warmth. It's obvious up close that she's impossibly pale, her face ashen and her hand a bloodless white where it rests against the covers, cupped protectively over her wound, though her lips and cheeks are beginning to regain some pinkness; there are hollows under her eyes, so deep they look almost like bruises, and he thinks that she's awake much too soon, that she ought to have rested for much longer than this. Her eyes are alert and clear when she opens them to look up at him, though, and the fingers of her other hand twine around the IV tubing coming from the needles in her arm, in between the bones in the back of her palm, the motion just enough to suggest she finds the restriction uncomfortable.

It's a good sign, a _very_ good sign, and though she can't quite see him smiling, he can see her smile tightly back.

"Herr Kuhn," she manages, her voice weak but gaining strength with every word. "I'm told you're the hero of the hour. I wanted to thank you for...." She flounders a moment, clearly unwilling to take the path of the trite. "For pulling me out of there," she decides on eventually instead, but Hansel feels a sudden drip of ice down his spine again, an inkling of revelation that he does not want rising and unfolding within his brain, about to make itself known.

 _Herr Kuhn._ She'd called him Hansel in the Humvee, had been personal and forthright and straight to the point. He'd thought at the time that she might not recall it, that she had been dying and he had no right to take advantage of it - but he'd hoped too, hoped that she would retain that fleeting moment, would recognize it for how it changed their paradigm.

Oh, damn his soul to the darkest depths of the Morning Star's domain. He deserves this but does not want to know of it, does not want to face the inevitable truth. But there is only one way to determine it, and that is to move forward. "Hyu are welcome, Fraulein Hill," he returns, low and even, testing the waters; Maria scoffs gently and tosses her head a little, as if the loose hair around her face annoys her. It's cute - endearing, even, and Hansel can't help but smile behind the mask.

The smile is washed away by the wave of ice that floods over him, however, when she says offhandedly, "You saved my life, Herr Kuhn. The least you can do is call me Maria."

Hansel is glad that most of his face is obscured by the mask, because Maria can't see it when he feels his heart crack quite neatly down the middle.


	10. House Arrest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Work and life ate me, my apologies. :x 
> 
> For those curious as to some of the references in this story and UALP - the London job and what happened in Belgium, for one - I've written a short bit over here called [He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother](http://archiveofourown.org/works/621092/chapters/1120912), depicting some events of Hansel & Gretel's life from Gretel's perspective.

"Well, this looks familiar." 

Maria Hill, one arm slung over Marina Petrovka's shoulders, sighs as loudly as she can manage when her best friend eyes her living room with one brow arched, a rather delicate brand of censure written all across her familiar features. Maria has enough pull in SHIELD to rank an entire stand-alone home of her own, even if it _is_ only base housing, but despite the luxurious amount of space for a single agent, the house looks like a trailer park fresh after a tornado. The foyer, and the living room beyond it, are a maze of dirty clothes, discarded shoes and fast-food boxes; the centerpiece, on Maria's well-buried coffee table, is a truly impressive multi-terraced palazzo constructed of pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers. It's starting to look a little green from Maria's stay in Medical, but that hardly bothers her. She's thrown out entire primitive civilizations from the containers in her fridge, on those rare occasions when she can be motivated to do some actual cleaning.

Marishka, on the other hand, has the expression Maria rather imagines a chef might wear when presented with a workspace in such defiance of health code that it just might be easier to burn the whole restaurant down and start over. It's an _And here I thought I'd seen it all_ expression, and makes Maria roll her eyes as they hobble together for the sofa, the sofa itself draped with enough dirty clothes than Maria can't quite remember the pattern of the upholstery.

"Hush, you. I spend all day cleaning up other people's messes, I don't have the patience for it when I get home," she grumbles as they navigate the labyrinth of disarray. By the time they reach the couch, though, Maria is already out of breath and limping, the gunshot wound in her side pulsing in time with her every heartbeat, tendrils of pain snaking through the bones of her ribs and up her back, reaching all the way to her shoulder and down into her hip. Her free hand sneaks up to press against it, strictly against doctor's orders, and Marishka makes a disapproving noise, but doesn't remark upon it until Hill sinks bonelessly down into the couch cushions. 

"I can't believe you let yourself get shot," snorts Marina, already picking up pizza boxes to ferry them towards the door. Under other circumstances, Maria would stop her - it's kind of impertinent of her friend, cleaning up her living room for her like Maria is one of the Grimm boys, none of whom seem to know the meaning of the words 'trashcan' or 'laundry hamper' - but she's too sore to go through with it, and instead slumps further into her sofa (or the pile of fabric currently masquerading as her sofa), one hand lifted just high enough over the back of the couch to flip Marina the bird. The former spy crows with laughter, but barely slows down. "What were you _thinking,_ charging in there like a conquering hero? They pay you to sit in the command tent and delegate, don't they?"

"I was thinking my men were being _shot at_ and possibly killed by a previously unknown enemy," grumbles Maria, rubbing her fingertips over the vein above her left eye; she really ought to be in too much pain for a migraine, but the pills for her injury haven't quite kicked in yet, and she's already missing the morphine drip from her stay in a hospital gurney. The pressurization of the cabin on the flight home from Austria had been enough hell without the added insult of Marina's teasing. "How was I supposed to know it was a forties-era booby trap?"

Careful re-exploration of the Dornröschen facility, as the file now officially lists it, had borne up the initial estimation that it had been long abandoned; what the overflights and tentative poking around hadn't detected, however, was a cache of hallucinogenic gas that had been left behind when the compound had been evacuated, and quite likely had been the original reason for said evacuation, given the symptoms - disorientation, impairment of motor function, loss of memory and paranoia, but most importantly, nightmarish, incredibly violent delirium, and in many cases, psychotic rage. Just a whiff of the stuff could turn an otherwise exemplary soldier into a shuddering, neurotic mess.... or a vicious murderer. 

SHIELD's biochemical department is currently quite fascinated with it - there are notations in the file on its effectual similarity to the RAGE virus, possibly even a precursor to the viral work, though structurally it is closer to flunitrazepam - but the notes have quickly devolved into a scientific argument that Maria does not have the depth and breadth of knowledge to fully plumb. What she _does_ understand is how it had infected her soldiers - the stuff had been stored in pressurized tanks in the very ends of the northern wing of the compound, but left to sit for nearly a century in the rot and damp, the rust had eaten tiny, porous holes into the metal, until the gas leaked into the surrounding areas. Invisible to the naked eye and heavier than air, the gas had built and built, locked deep in a sealed medical facility, with no ventilation - until Bravo Team had opened a door and let it loose among them. It could have sat there for days, months, _years_ without being disturbed, before Bravo Six had had the misfortune of walking right into it. 

(Though she stays away from such conjecture in the official reports, Maria Hill has her suspicions that the HYDRA agents that had staffed the facility had planned for exactly such an outcome. It smacks of that particular subtle cruelty of the Third Reich, and more specifically, that disregard for human life that seems to always surround the legacy of Johan Schmidt. 

After all, why allow an enemy to gain something of HYDRA's without first paying a terrible price?)

So many dead SHIELD agents due to that simple tactical error, at least four of them confirmed suicides. 

Maria throws an arm over her face to hide her eyes, as if it is so simple to hide from the blood of dead soldiers, the weight and balance of her career at SHIELD freshly speckled with crimson red.

"You should be more careful," Marina is saying chidingly, the movement of her voice allowing Maria to track her as she goes about the house; Maria suspects that Marishka does this apurpose as well, to keep her friend from being startled or losing her position. It isn't a large house, but as Marina transfers trash to the foyer and piles clothes in one corner of the living room, it is slowly becoming more livable. Maria isn't sure if she ought to thank her or demand that she leave - just because the house is a mess doesn't mean she doesn't know where everything _is._ "You're command, you can't go colting around like that, acting like a field agent every chance you get." A pause. "Not with that kind of aim, anyway." 

Maria sits bolt upright, twists through the pain to glare at Marishka, the Russian bearing an impish grin on her face to defend against the dark stare. "There is _nothing_ wrong with my aim, Petrovka."

"You _missed._ " Marishka clucks her tongue. "God's sake, Maria. What would Clint say? You're the Assistant Director of SHIELD, you ought to be able to hit the broad side of a _barn_ , nevermind a man less than ten feet away." 

_A HYDRA agent in black body armor, face obscured by a heavy mask, shotgun in his hands and death writ in every line of his form._

Maria shudders away from the image. Despite knowing intellectually that it was Hansel come to pull her out of that hellpit, and no HYDRA agent at all, the picture lingers viscerally, haunts her nightmares, the agent entirely too aware that she had stared her own end in the face and missed what could have been the most critical shot of her rapidly shortening life. Those damned HYDRA scientists would have been inordinately pleased with themselves to know that exposure to their damn chemical made the hallucinations so terrifying that they still affect a hardened agent weeks after the fact. She shifts away from Marina to hide the twist of expression on her face, curls up against the arm of the couch with her knees up to block her wounded belly; Marishka is not so heavy into the teasing, though, that she misses the change in how Maria holds herself, how Maria forgoes the opening for a rebuttal, and she drops the teasing for few minutes as Maria collects herself, Marishka instead hauling dirty clothing free of the sofa, adding the tangle of trousers and dirty socks to the growing pile in the corner. 

(The couch is a nondescript shade of beige, well-worn but comfortable. Maria vaguely remembers that it came with the house, and having little furniture of her own, she had decided not to argue with its presence.) 

She presses her palms to cover her eyes, and feels the cushions dip as Marina finally deigns to sit down next to her. At least Marina knows better than to touch her right now - she can't handle the contact, not without reacting the way that SHIELD has trained her to, and there will be no violence introduced into Maria's house unless she absolutely cannot help it.

"That bad, huh?" the Russian says softly, and Maria lifts her head, folds her arms across the tops of her knees to rest her cheek upon. The position hurts faintly, makes the bandages tug at her wound, but she studiously ignores the pain. 

"Let's just say I understand why some of my soldiers chose to opt out." Marina blanches and Maria, scoffing quietly, rolls her eyes again. "Oh for fuck's sake, Marina, I'm not a candidate for suicide watch. I might be by the end of my _confinement,_ " and the word is dripping with disdain, but what else to call the house arrest that had been the condition of her release from Medical? "because if nothing else I will be bored to tears sitting here doing paperwork and watching daytime TV until I want to _shoot myself_ -" 

"Hey now, I hear that La Femme Nikita show is pretty good. If you don't know anything about SHIELD protocol, anyway," Marina offers, tentative but hopeful, and Maria allows herself to smile faintly back. 

"You'll be the first person I call after I watch it. But really, Marishka, I'm fine. I'd rather be _working,_ but I'm fine." Maria gestures vaguely around the somewhat-cleaner house, lets her legs slide down to set her feet on the floor. "I'm a big girl, I can take care of myself. I've got strict instructions from Medical, plenty of supplies and painkillers, and a crate full of books that I haven't read yet. I'll survive until they let me out. Maybe I'll even take up cleaning house." 

There's about two heartbeats between when Maria says it and when Marishka bursts out laughing, but the giggle is heartfelt all the same. "Not likely," cackles the Russian, but when her hand lands on the other woman's shoulder, Maria feels (much to her relief) no violent impulses, nothing but a warmth of friendship that suffuses her whole frame. "Call me if you need me, alright? I won't be far away."

"Yes, mom," snarks Maria, rolling her eyes like a petulant teen, but the women share a hug before Maria attempts to clamber to her feet. Marishka stops her with another hand on her shoulder, and though the gesture itself is infuriating enough - Maria is hurt, not an _invalid_ \- the fact that she is weak enough to be pinned by it is even worse. 

"Sit and rest, you," Marishka says, still smiling, but with the sternness of a woman used to taking care of the injured. "I'll lock the door on my way out." 

Marina is, at least, kind enough to take the bulk of the trash out with her.

It's quiet after she leaves, with only the low hum of the heater to fill the silence; combined with the absence of the pizza-box palazzo and the general openness of the space, the house feels almost empty, and Maria turns on the TV less to actually _watch_ anything and more to have the background noise filling up the void. Changing out of her hospital sweats and into pajamas and a camisole make her feel a bit more at home, at least, despite how long it takes to perform the act, out of breath and gasping in pain well before she's in her own clothes, every movement that pulls agony from the puckered mark where she'd been shot in the belly. It takes laying down on her bed and shimmying into the bottoms to get them on, and were it not for the fact that Maria doesn't dare go topless in February even in her own house, she's tempted to let the camisole win the fight it puts up at being tugged over her shoulders. 

She putters around for nearly an hour afterward, mostly curled up on the couch with her feet tucked into the hems of her pajamas, doing practically nothing - a load of laundry goes in, but she doesn't have the will to pull it back out and fold it, given that it barely puts a dent in Mount Dirty-clothes in the corner - while the TV rattles on, tuned mostly by accident to some documentary about big cats on the BBC. The pills kick in eventually, leaving her in a calm, cool blue haze almost completely free of pain, and at some point she must have drifted off to the dulcet tones of British documentors, because when there's a sharp _rat-tat-tat_ on the door, Maria jerks upright on the couch, and inexplicably, the first thing she notices is that Big Cat Diary has changed over Top Gear, and a man is molesting the hell out of one very expensive car on camera.

The knocking comes again, loud as gunshots in the quiet house, and Maria grumbles in the direction of the door, "Jesus, I'm coming," though the proposal is easier said than done; getting up off the couch is a trial, and if she were being tested for inebriation she'd never make it through the walk-a-straight-line bit, but she gets to the door without tripping or running into anything, and Maria considers this a triumph. She's got one hand rubbing at the side of her face when she throws open the front door, though, bleary-eyed and muzzy. "Forget something, Marishka? You could have just -"

Standing there on the porch to her house, however, coat collar turned up against the late winter chill, is none other than Hansel Kuhn. There's a white plastic bag emblazoned with the Lucky Dragon Chinese Eatery logo dangling from one hand, his jaw is just a little slack, and his robin's-egg eyes are just a little too wide in his rugged face. 

".... called," finishes Maria lamely, just as unprepared to face him as he is to see her, suddenly completely and utterly awake.

xxxxx

(The previous hour, for Hansel, goes something like this: 

Will stands in the kitchen by the sink, assiduously stirring a bowl of what will soon enough be cookie dough. Brian's out on the range, and thus likely to be absent most of the night. Kenny and Clint are in the living room watching Jason play some obscure video game from Japan, the younger Grimms occasionally shouting things like "Ram it! Ram it with the airship!" and "Fucking Ruby WEAPON, are you _kidding?!_ " Hansel sits at the kitchen counter and watches them all, soaking in the presence of his sons, attempting not to think on Dornröschen or Maria Hill and, for the most part, succeeding. When Marina returns home, she drops her keys on the kitchen counter with a noisy clatter and gets in Will's way just long enough to steal a kiss, before she doffs her coat and moves to stuff it into the already overfull hall closet. "How's Maria?" calls Will, adding a bit of flour to the mix. 

"Well as can be expected, given the circumstances," says Marina from over her shoulder. "I'm a little worried about her going crazy from boredom, but given the state of her house, she's more likely to die from tetanus first." Marina shudders theatrically. "I'm pretty sure one of the pizza boxes I threw away was so old it called me 'mama'."

"Well, Maria is a busy woman, usually," notes Will; when Marina sidles into the kitchen and attempts to steal a bit of cookie dough by slipping her fingers into the bowl, he smacks her on the back of the hand with the wooden spoon with a loud _THWACK_ , Will himself hardly even pulled out of rhythm by her indignant squawk, much less her mock-hurt glare. "Inactivity is just something she'll have to get used to." 

"Mishaaa," whines the Russian, molding herself to her partner's back - Will allows it, but continues to guard the circumference of the bowl with the arc of his forearms, despite Marina's hands wandering up his chest. Even Hansel rolls his eyes at the obvious ploy. "Let me have just a _little_ taste?" 

"It's raw egg, sugar and chocolate, Marishka. It's bad for you." 

"And that's _exactly_ why I want it so much." She purrs it, her hands slipping under Will's 'Danger - Man Cooking' apron. Hansel flicks his gaze away, squelching a rising tide of irrational jealousy; Clint starts making gagging noises from the living room. 

"Jesus, guys," complains Jason, currently locked in battle with an enormous red monster, "can we please avoid getting any fluids in the cookies? We _eat_ what comes out of that kitchen."

"Raw egg, bad for you," mumbles Kenny, scrubbing at his scalp with the heel of one hand. "Like having sex in the _kitchen_ isn't bad enough for you." This gives both Jason and Clint enough pause that both brothers turn on Kenny to interrogate him in how _exactly_ he knows that kind of information; the squabbling rises quickly in volume to a cacophonous racket, and Hansel can almost see Marina and Will making the decision to ignore them, even when the three-way arguments devolve into a wrestling match on the rug in front of the television. Hansel tunes them out; as amusing as his sons' horseplay is, he can't quite find the energy or the mood to be terribly interested. 

Marina is still focused on the bowl of cookie batter, and she makes a moue of complaint in the back of her throat, molding herself to Will's back, soon up on tiptoe to kiss the nape of his neck and try to sweeten it out of him. Will seemed unfazed by her attempts to catch a fly with sugar, though, stepping out of her hold and smiling beatifically. "If you're good, I'll let you have the first cookie of the first batch, to tide you over."

"I want the first cookie out of _every_ batch," returns Marina, arms folded to cradle her chest, and laughing, Will agrees.

"Done. Now out of my kitchen, woman, I've got work to do." 

"Will - can hyu make an extra batch?" asks Hansel, the first words he has spoken in quite some time; the boys tussling on the rug behind him don't notice, but Will and Marina stare directly at him, as if the hunter has sprouted a second head from his shoulders. Hansel sighs and glances away from their scrutiny, his face as carefully neutral as he can make it. "Hyu said Maria cannot leave home until the doctors clear her for work. Her house is only a few streets over, _ja?_ I thought," he lifts his hand to gesture vaguely, "it would be nice to take her some of hyur cookies. Something better to eat than pizza."

Will's eyebrows shoot up, and Marina goes still next to him; what follows is a hyperactive flurry of motion that stills even the wrestling boys in the living room, three blonde heads popping up to stare at Marishka as she moves around the kitchen, talking a mile a minute about setting up what greatly appears to be a romantic dinner between Hansel and the Assistant Director. Will allows it to go on for a good three minutes - just long enough to get the cookie batter doled out and the pans in the oven, bowl in the sink and full of water, safely out of Marina's reach. At that point, he washes his hands, turns around, and puts his hands over Marina's where they rest on the pantry door, stopping her from making yet another trip for supplies into the walk-in pantry. 

"Marishka, _samaya malen'kaya,_ " smiles the eldest of Hansel's sons, "I think I have a better idea.")

And now here he is, a plastic bag of Chinese food (plus a Tupperware container of homemade cookies) in hand, gawking like a greenhorn at Maria Hill; granted, he hadn't expected her to answer the door with her hair a riotous dark mess around her head and draped across her shoulders, wearing a strappy white camisole, blue fleece pajama bottoms patterned with what Marina will later assure him are little Scottie dogs, _and nothing else._ _Gott im himmel,_ it's enough to make the bottom fall right out out of Hansel's stomach. 

He rallies after a few awkward moments, though, straightening his back, offerring the bag of food, and very definitely keeping his eyes above shoulder level on Maria. "I thought," he manages, by some miracle keeping his tone even, "hyu would appreciate some dinner. Marishka said hyu had nothing in hyur refrigerator."

"She did, did she?" Maria takes a few moments to rally as well, but her bearing shifts subtly when she takes the bag of food, and she steps aside, behind the door, to beckon him into her home, watching him carefully as he brings a breath of winter into her sanctum. He shuts the door behind him with a heel, doffs his coat to hang next to her own, even takes the trouble of toeing off his boots. What is left is a black tee, black socks, and a pair of worn, soft jeans tight enough that Hansel is almost afraid to sit down in them; Marishka fussed for entirely too long over his attire, the way to comb his hair, what shoes he ought to wear, but those jeans were the crowning glory of her hard work, and she assured him that they were proof against failure, or at least against Maria kicking him out of her house early. 

He just tries not to feel self-conscious as he explores further into Fraulein Hill's home, one of the most private of private places on the base. 

(He isn't aware of it at the time, but he moves through Maria's house as if he is exploring the inner sanctum of a witch's lair - every step soft, but measured and deliberate, head swiveling back and forth to sweep for potential traps and threats. 

Maria finds it telling. Gretel finds it hilarious.) 

For all of Marina's whining about the cleanliness of the place, Hansel finds it more than suitable, though perhaps a bit.... unlived-in, for all that there is a mountain of laundry in one corner and he can clearly see the lines in the dust where the infamous pizza-box pagoda used to dwell. But though there is furniture and a television and appliances, there are few personal touches - no photographs on the walls, no knick-knacks on the shelves. There's a smattering of framed certificates clustered in the foyer, a few mounted weapons in the kitchen, and one section of wall in the living room is an enormous built-in bookcase crammed to capacity with volumes and gun paraphernalia, but for these few things there is very little to tell him that here lives Maria Hill, Assistant Director of SHIELD. 

Hansel supposes that as much time as Maria spends at work, in her office or in Fury's, she likely considers those places equally as much her house. But none of them are _home._

(A tiny, tiny part of his inner self squeezes tight in sadness at the thought, because even when he and Gretel were on the road hunting witches, they always had a _home_ \- it just happened to be each other.)

Maria limps into the kitchen, dropping the bag of food on the counter as she goes, and in moments there is a clatter of ceramic and metal as she starts pulling out plates, glasses, utensils. "Well, shit, if I have company I might as well bust out the fine china. Have a seat, anywhere's fine."

The witch hunter gingerly perches himself at the edge of what was once a reasonably beige couch; now it looks altogether green around the edges, and he briefly wonders if the thing will attempt to rear up and swallow him whole. A British man is lavishing almost fetishistic attention to a car on the television screen, and Hansel frowns at it but doesn't dare to attempt to wrangle it according to his whims - the last time he attempted to use the remote, he had somehow locked the channel to a channel showcasing some sort of congressional debate, and it had taken Jason _hours_ to undo what Hansel had wrought in minutes.

He is soon rescued from being an unwitting voyeur into the BBC's version of pornography by Maria limping back into the living room, a plate in either hand; the selections are many, the portions roughly even among all selections, and on her own plate, noodles are piled haphazardly across the whole affair. The 'fine china' turns out to be mismatched Corelle and a tarnished silver fork, but it's all freshly washed, and Hansel has eaten more than one meal directly off of a tavern table, which therefore makes him highly unlikely to complain about Maria's haphazard service, even if she's already half-begun before she hands him his plate. There's an eggroll already clenched between her teeth when she sits down, and he finds himself strangely envious of it.

She has enough foresight, at least, to set a fork atop his food, though she herself wields a set of enameled chopsticks with impossibly graceful precision, as if they are weapons in and of themselves. (Hansel would not be surprised if they were; he's killed equally dangerous creatures with stranger items, and the Fraulein in question is a very dangerous creature indeed.)

Canny agent she is, Maria drops her egg roll to her plate and waits until he has a mouthful of General Tsao's chicken, before she says, blunt as a board to the face, "Why did you lie to Agent Coulson?" 

Hansel chokes on the spices and spends several long minutes thumping his chest and getting air back into his lungs, while Maria sits and watches impassively, one brow arched over her teal gaze. _"Vas?"_ he manages, still trying to dislodge sesame seeds from where he's snorted them up his nose. 

"At the hospital, in Austria. Right after I got out of surgery." He has to give her credit - even injured, even curled into a little ball on the far end of the couch with her legs drawn up against her chest, feet tucked into the hems of her pajama pands, plate balanced precariously on her knees and her pupils blown from the painkillers, she is still every bit as ferocious as that night she ground his face into the mat in the training hall. "He was debriefing you." 

Hansel openly gawks at her, jaw slack, his estimation of Maria Hill's fortitude rising several more notches. "Hyu were awake for that?" 

"Don't change the subject." She snaps her chopsticks together inches from his face, the little _snikt_ sound reminiscent of blades clacking. "Why did you lie to him? I need to know what happened. And don't try to stonewall me, Hansel," adds Maria, eyes ablaze as she pokes him in the shoulder with the tips of the sticks. Her plate wobbles dangerously with the movement. "Coulson asked you a question, a yes or no question. And you answered him." Her eyes narrow. "In _English._ Phil didn't catch it, but I did. Your English is better these days, but you still default to German for the quick answers. It's a terrible habit." 

He blinks at her once, twice; mostly it is at how quickly she has picked him apart, but also somewhat at the easy familiarity with which she uses his name, and at least a bit over her referring to Agent Coulson as _Phil._ His emotions over that rapid assemblage of sentences are more than a little conflicted. 

Maria scoffs softly at him in between bites of lo mein. "Never play poker, Hansel, I can read you like an open book. Now, tell me. What happened, that you felt you needed to lie?" 

And Hansel, to give credence to his sideways sense of honor, does in fact consider coming clean with her in this moment; it would be simple enough, to tell her what transpired in the back of that Humvee, tears tracking down his face as he believed with his entire being that he was sole witness to Maria Hill's final moments, grief like a knife in his throat and the taste of her mouth on his lips. It might discredit Doyle a little - the soldier _had_ to have covered for them, there is no other way that Maria does not know every detail already - but that was a risk that Doyle had chosen to take, the second he had not revealed Hansel and the Assistant Director for what they had done, even if Maria didn't even remember half of it. 

But the other side of the argument is that he cannot bring himself to say _You told me you wanted to be conquered,_ because even if she were dying in that exact moment and therefore excused for whatever whims she felt at the time, to say so now that she is mostly healed is an insult to her fierce pride; Maria is a warrior, and she does not have the time or inclination to appreciate weakness, not in her soldiers or her commanders, and most acutely not in herself. 

Some challenges are never meant to be surmounted, only eroded away, with patience and time. Hansel has a surplus of both, these days. 

"Hyu were raving," he shrugs, picking at his food, eyes on his plate. "Half dead. Blood drunk, even. Hyu tried to kill me when I came for hyu. Doyle said there was something in the air, than made good men act as if they'd gone mad, through no fault of their own." He rolls one shoulder, spears a meaty white oval in amongst his rice, examines it suspiciously on the end of the fork. He's reasonably certain that it's some kind of shellfish - perhaps a scallop? - but given his lifelong love of native cuisine and innate distrust of anything exotic ( _don't eat the candy_ ) it still takes him peripherally seeing Maria eat one, with great relish, before he can bring himself to put it in his mouth. It's salty and chewy, and takes him several long seconds to chew and swallow. "I don't think SHIELD has the right to judge hyu for that. Not when it was something so far beyond hyur control." 

Maria is very still on her end of the couch when he lifts his gaze to hers, chopsticks perched above her plate. The expression on her strong-featured face is difficult to read, somewhere between furious and impressed; Hansel gestures helplessly with his fork, making of his own visage as if carven from stone. "That is part of the meaning of _compromised,_ _ja?_ Control?" 

She's silent for a few more stuttered heartbeats, before a reluctant curve lifts the corner of her mouth, and plate in hand to twirl lo mein onto her chopsticks, she uncurls a little from where she sits, relaxing just enough that the bottoms of her bare feet come into contact with the side of his leg, toes just peeking out from the bottoms of her pajama pants. Her feet are cold, but Hansel always runs hot these days, and he pretends not to notice. "Not always. But thank you for your discretion." Beat. "And for dinner." 

"Hyu are welcome, Fraule-" Her stormy expression makes him catch himself mid-honorific. "Er. Maria." 

"Better." She slurps down the entire mess of lo mein on her chopsticks, then points the little enameled slivers of death in his direction. "Now. Tell me what I've missed on base since I've been out on LOA. Fury cut off my home connection to the SHIELD servers, and I _will_ go mad if I'm out of the loop any longer."

And it isn't as if Hansel knows anything of import - Clint has taken him people-watching once or twice, and he has few real friends on post that aren't related to him by blood - but Maria listens to every tidbit as if it were of the utmost importance, wolfing down her food in gigantic bites as she does so. In such a manner they work through a truly enormous chunk of the food that Hansel brought, and over half of the cookies besides, the discovery of which are a revelation unto themselves. ("Oh my god," crows Maria when she opens the Tupperware container, "are these Will cookies? _You brought me Will cookies._ Do you need someone killed? I can have someone killed for you, these cookies are that good.") 

Eventually the news of the base runs dry, and they sit together instead in companionable silence, Maria changing the channel to some fascinating black-and-white affair about a missing falcon statue, something Maria calls a _film noir_ that appeals to the hunter in Hansel's soul. It's hours later when Maria's strength begins to flag, her colour pale and her features drawn; Hansel guesses that the painkillers are finally beginning to wear off, and quietly excuses himself to shuffle off toward the door. Maria leaves the dishes on the coffee table and follows him, leaning against the foyer wall as the witch hunter tugs his boots on and wraps himself back up in his coat. 

He's all the way to the door, hand on the deadbolt, before he can find the courage to say something, anything, and even then all that comes out is, "Goodnight, Maria." 

"Goodnight, Hansel." She doesn't smile at him, not really, but her eyes crinkle a little at the corners, and that small sign of esteem gives him hope. He's got the door open and is halfway across the threshold when she calls out after him, "Same time tomorrow? Bring Mexican. And be punctual," she adds, as imperiously as a queen, which makes Hansel smile all unexpectedly, like dawn breaking over the horizon. 

"I will be here," he promises solemnly, and walks through the February cold for home with a light step.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual IM conversation:
> 
>  **GalahadsGurl:** But why is Will making cookies?  
>  **Amerou:** Will is making cookies _because fucking cookies_


	11. Transitioning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things have to get worse before they can get better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timeline: March through September 1997. Almost done with this ridiculously extensive flashback, I promise, and then we can get back into the UALP timeline. ;x

They settle into something of a routine, after that. 

It maintains itself for several weeks with surprisingly little effort, the myriad souls featured in Maria Hill's decidedly small social circle conspiring to keep her from going absolutely insane. In the mornings, Coulson stops by to check on the Assistant Director and leave her a heavy manila folder of papers to look over and sign, collecting the folder from the day before with rather the attitude of a grade-school teacher leaving his students their homework. By noon, Marishka brings over lunch, and on days Maria has appointments scheduled in Medical, she also ferries the disgruntled SHIELD agent to and fro, ushering her into and out of Will's NSX with exactly the sort of calm, soothing temperament as a mother driving her child to kindergarten. From what Hansel is told, Maria objects to the treatment loudly and often violently, slamming doors, growling at people and generally being as grumpy as possible; she is not, as she will sharply inform anyone who makes the mistake of giving her aid where it is unwarranted, a child to be coddled, but a grown-ass woman, thank you very much. She's capable of putting on her own clothes in the morning and everything.

Even Coulson is ready to taze her into submission, after the first week.

Hansel, on the other hand, sees a different Maria when he arrives for their nightly dinner meetings; by then she's had her pain pills and some time to herself in the calm quiet of the house, and though she does not precisely answer the door with a smile she never tarries to reach it at his knock, attired in an ever-changing array of increasingly improbably-patterned pajamas and snatching takeout boxes from his hands with brisk aplomb. The food is divided evenly, for the most part (though Hansel pretends not to notice when Maria weights her own plate with higher concentrations of her favorites) and the entertainment is a fascinating series of classic movies from Maria's shockingly extensive collection. _The Maltese Falcon_ is only the beginning - Hansel finds, all unexpectedly,that he has a taste for hard-boiled detective stories, the vivid imagery and snappy dialogue resonating pleasantly with the better aspects of his memories of hunting witches. He and Maria have long, ardent discussions over Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor; it does not occur to him for quite some time afterward that Maria is educating him in the vagaries of her unusual tastes, but as Hansel has very little else to compare them to, they do not seem so odd at the time. 

He never stays later than ten, as punctual to leave as he is to arrive, and Maria slowly becomes more comfortable with his presence as time wears on. More often than not they are shoulder to shoulder on the roomy couch, a blanket draped across the Assistant Director's legs to provide her the veiling excuse of borrowing warmth. 

In the second week of March, the pills begin to lose their effectiveness, and Maria spends three nights sitting curled tight against Hansel's side as the movies play, her head down and shoulders hunched, face pinched as the ache of the wound makes itself stubbornly known no matter how much medicine she takes. At her next appointment, Medical changes her medication but direly overshoots the mark on the dosage - that first night, Hansel ends up carrying her to her own bed, the Fraulein so dizzy that she cannot convince her own knees to hold her weight, too weak even to protest at being hauled about like some delicate storybook maiden. She's asleep before he finishes tucking her in, face buried in her pillows and flinching away from the light streaming in from the hallway.

He walks into Medical the next day and has what Hansel believes to be a very long, very calm chat with the highest-ranking officer he can find; it isn't until Marishka makes an offhanded comment about a sudden change of caretaker that he realizes the Assistant Director's previous doctor has had something of a mental breakdown because of it. 

By early April, though, despite the combined efforts of much of SHIELD - and almost the entire Grimm family - Maria is clawing at the walls to get out into the world, and Medical is forced (practically at gunpoint) to clear her for light duty. She returns to the offices of SHIELD with scarcely a pause and absolutely no fanfare, resuming her duties as if she had never left, deft and clever as she navigates the inevitable minefield left by a six-week absence locked in her own home. She's back on the range inside an hour of the end of the first workday, the next morning taking long walks with weights strapped to her legs in lieu of her usual load of PT while the last of her stitches heal; the bandages that remain are invisible beneath her uniform, and if the navy-blue SHIELD issue catsuit is a little tighter around her midsection, well, no one has the suicidal lack of tact to comment on it.

(Inactivity looks good on Maria; the extra poundage derived from plenty of rich foods and no exercise softens the hard lines of her face, rounds her hips and thighs in a way that is attractive for vastly different reasons than when she is in peak physical condition.

Hansel will never, ever tell her so, however, because he is quite content to have his testicles remain in their current position - namely, attached to his body.)

Coulson stops dropping by to check on Maria, and Marishka tones back her visits a touch, but the Assistant Director never says anything to Hansel about pruning back their dinners held in companionable silence. Hansel feels quietly privileged now, to be allowed to see Maria at the end of a long day and at her weakest, when she is tired and frazzled and her teal eyes are narrow and weary beneath fret brows, slumped in her pajamas against the couch with their shoulders just barely touching. 

For the first time since Dornröschen, Hansel allows himself to feel a blossoming growth of frail, stubborn hope, like white flowers stitched tight against the black flint of his heart.

xxxxx

It's almost a slap in the face when she summons him back to The Office, that carefully-chosen conference room where his fingerprints still linger in the lacquer of the table.

She is, as last time, an immaculate warrior-queen where she sits on the far side of the table, her legs folded neatly at the ankle and a manila folder on the table in front of her; Hansel, forearms braced in the doorway, has a dizzying and extremely uncomfortable sensation of deja vu, frowning sharply down at the picture she presents, half-expecting her to say 'Right on time, Herr Kuhn' and ask him to have a seat. The feeling lessens somewhat when she glances up at him, however, and he sees the pinscratch frown between her dark eyebrows, the tightness in the lines around her eyes. This is a briefing, very certainly, and for her to have chosen The Office means she is uncertain of his reaction to it, but whatever lies in the manila folder trapped between her slender hands worries her very nearly as much on its own merit.

"Close the door, Hansel," says Maria, lifting one set of digits to rub at her forehead, and he knows her mannerisms well enough by now to spot the layer of steel concealing the weariness in her voice. "This isn't a mission briefing, but I hope I don't have to tell you that nothing goes beyond the walls of this room."

He slips into The Office, pulling the door shut behind him, and slides into the chair across from her, all in one smooth movement, an economy of motion that is likely telling of his suspicions. In the moment, Hansel does not care. "What is it?"

"Do you remember the filing cabinets you found, at the Dornröschen facility?" Her tone is brisk and businesslike, but her hands tremor briefly on the manila. Hesitation, and not at the subject of Dornröschen itself; Maria does not want to broach this new topic, however it is related, and Hansel's concern for the contents of the folder increases tenfold. He nods, does not answer aloud, watches with tension ratcheting up through his spine and shoulders as she wrestles with the information, drops her chin a little, as if she were a bull and could simply power through whatever unpleasantness awaits beneath the deceptively plain cover of the folder. "In them were records of experiments performed there - sparse notes, mostly handwritten by different persons, very patchy. As the facility was clearly purged at some point, this gives us reason to believe that the papers we recovered were initial drafts of some sort, left accidentally when the rest of Dornröschen was cleared out." She takes a breath, stiffens her back; she has danced around the subject for long enough, and she meets his gaze sternly. She's moving quickly now, getting it all out in a huff, attempting to land the strikes to his conscience before his temper boils over. "They were for a eugenics program, along the lines of Project Cahill, only using.... much more traditional methods. It was a complete failure, but from the intelligence we've accumulated from similar sites, it was hardly the German government's _final_ attempt."

Here is where her gaze breaks from his, and she finally finds the nerve to flip the folder open. Inside is a pathetic assemblage of paper, a few type-bare sheets and a single photograph, a Polaroid if his memory serves him, facedown in the thin little file. Maria slides it across the table to him and says simply, "A SHIELD ops team recovered this from a decommissioned HYDRA base in Poland two years ago. We've dated it to the early seventies." 

For one long moment, Hansel's world narrows to the photo and Maria's voice; the contents of the picture are deceptively plain, a boy-child of no older than four with a fluff of fine tawny hair, dressed in clothes at least two sizes too large for his chubby frame and seated on what appears to be an examination table, the picture as a whole thrown into sharp relief from what must have been a burst of light. It's the child's face that stops Hansel in his tracks, though, the achingly familiar echo of familiar features, the boy's keenly aware, far too adult expression, and most of all, the speculative shade of blue in his slightly squinted eyes.

Hansel's heart seizes in his chest, because while this mysterious child might have been blessed with fair coloring, the eyes that peer at him from out of the photograph are unmistakably shaped like Gretel's.

" _Vas_ ...?" His voice emerges as a hoarse croak, such that he doesn't even recognize it; he can hardly imagine what his own face looks like, when he lifts his head to look at Maria, but the Assistant Director's lips are a hard white line, and the lines of her frame are taut as wire. 

"As far as we can tell, he was never even given a name. Easier to erase his records that way," says Maria as gently as she can manage, the careful touch of the side of her foot to one of his own the sole comfort she dares to give him while in SHIELD confines. "All we can confirm is that, sometime in the mid-sixties, there were a series of experiments undertaken by the German government similar in vein to the ones that occurred at Dornröschen some thirty years earlier. All of the subjects produced failed to thrive," she tips her head slightly towards the Polaroid, "except one." 

The photo-paper crinkles in protest beneath Hansel's claw-curled hands, and he very delicately sets the picture down atop the conference table, mindful of this artifact's age, his only link to Gretel's son, his nephew. Maria watches him warily for signs of volcanic fury, but a terrible calm is settling over Hansel, now; all his life, he has watched children, bastions of innocence, abused in ways that would leave lesser men screaming, broken wretches - and while it is horrific knowledge, to know that his sister's flesh was stolen and subjugated against her will while they both slept, to know that her own child was brought into the world in no less gentle a fashion than his own precious boys were and without the luck of a guide like Marina to ease his way - despite all of that, this is _familiar ground_ , ground he spent near to three decades traversing at the bidding of commonfolk plagued by the depredations of supernatural creatures. That the boy is his own blood, and must certainly be a man grown by now, is almost irrelevant. 

A child, gone missing, in danger? 

Oh, yes. Hansel is eminently prepared for this.

There is the hunt, and then there is _the hunt_ ; the queer sensation of emotion draining away, like a curtain of steel links has been drawn between the wolf within and the man he is in broad daylight, is bracing, _cleansing,_ like welcoming an old friend to a long-abandoned hearth. "Give me the file," he says, and Maria does, watching him just as carefully as before but with much of the unease having left her frame. As much as this is his world, it is also hers. Hansel knows she is more than familiar with the mindset required to hunt beings of true evil. 

"There isn't much," Maria says quietly, shifting in her chair as Hansel scans the sparse papers in the manila folder. "The second program, while it had access to better technology, was deemed a waste of funds when the - genetic material proved almost completely nonviable." (She stumbles very slightly over the terminology, smoothly enough that if Hansel did not know her patterns of speech rather intimately, he might never have noticed.) "With no money and no prospects, we believe the project shut down, as some of the equipment was.... repurposed." He glances up at her nonplussed face just in time to see one dark brow tick up over her level gaze. "We've managed to trace a few serial numbers on the machinery to Project Cahill. It seems that the US government wasn't averse to learning from the mistakes of their predecessors." 

"And the boy?" he asks; Maria rolls one shoulder, noncommittal. 

"In the wind. No asset or operative matching his description and a rough age range shows up in any German, Polish or Austrian file we've been able to access, and if they've somehow disguised him as a civilian, then he's never paid a cent in taxes. We're still working on surrounding countries and German allies, but I have my doubts." She scoffs softly, gestures for the photograph on the table. "If not for that, we wouldn't even know that he ever existed." 

The papers in the manila folder bear up what Maria tells him, and he closes the folder quietly, places the aged photograph almost reverently atop them. The boy's stare from across the decades is suspicious, accusing, and entirely without fear; God's love, Hansel thinks, truly he took after his mother, though he had never met her and still never might. He would have made a ferocious hunter.

(He also wonders, in that moment, if this blue-eyed child ever left that examination room, or if the photograph is the last morbid record of an innocent life in the minutes before it was cut short. It is not so far a leap from creating life to ending it, after all.)

"What do you want to tell the boys?" Her voice is soft, intruding on his contemplation of that chubby little face; Hansel leans back in his chair, drops his hands into his lap, his demeanor relaxed even though he knows his eyes are burning. 

"Vhy should I tell them anything?" It comes out a little more harshly than he intends, and squinting, he modulates his tone before a startled Maria can be properly offended, gesturing vaguely in the air above the photograph. "I thank hyu for keeping hyur word, Maria, but there is nothing to tell. Not until he is found." _Dead or alive,_ is the unspoken addendum, and when he drops his hand to the tabletop, he is careful to avoid both the depressions in the wood shaped like his fingertips, and the edges of the manila folder alike. "My sons have enough burdens." 

Maria isn't fooled for a second. "You mean Will," she says, brow rising again, and it is Hansel's turn to scoff under his breath. 

"Of course I mean _mein Adler._ What, exactly, should I tell him? That he once had a cousin, my sister's only son, who may or may not be twenty years dead?" Hansel shakes his head, all at once now feeling the weight of his true age, pressing down on him. " _Nein._ When I find this boy, then I will tell him. Until then, there is no reason to open a wound that cannot be closed." _When,_ not _if,_ and Maria tips her head at him for it, but Hansel has been too long with the weight of a thousand dead children dragging around his neck to deal in uncertainties; either he finds the boy's bones, or he finds the man that boy becomes, and there is no room in his consideration for the idea that he might never locate either at all. "Is there anything else?" he asks, pushing the file back across the table, and Maria frowns at his abruptness a moment before she empties her face of all concern, becoming as blank and unfeeling as a statue. 

"No, that's all. If we find anything more, I'll pass it along to you." She tracks his movements as he shoves his chair back away from the table and stands, but does not mirror the gesture, nor does she call after him as he slips from the office and stalks away down the hall.

xxxxx

He does not go home that night, nor to Maria Hill's; instead he sits in Gretel's room in Medical, close up to her face with his forearms leaned heavy on her mattress and his cheek pillowed on his arms, and tells her in whispered German about the son she may never wake to see. The nurses don't dare to even attempt to dislodge him, and Marina's frantic calls seeking his whereabouts are summarily ignored, though some kind-hearted soul at SHIELD finally takes it upon himself to inform her as to where Hansel sits at Gretel's bedside.

No one else disturbs him. His family knows that his time with Gretel is sacrosanct, that none of them are welcome into this sanctum, hurtful as the idea may be - but there are just some things the witch hunter is not ready to share.

Hansel is still there in the morning when the Assistant Director comes to collect him, attired in her SHIELD finest, mission file in hand. While he has never been more grateful for an escape from the confines of his own mind, he cannot help but notice that Maria does not step across the threshold into Gretel's room, respectful of the boundary even full of deepest frost.

xxxxx

Late April sees him in Poland, escorting a small group of agents as they explore a section of the decommissioned HYDRA base previously deemed too unstable to be safely explored; though they find nothing of import, Hansel spends a very long time standing in an otherwise unremarkable examination room before his comrades call him out of it, and he is unusually quiet for the remaining duration of the assignment.

(When he comes home, he does not return to Maria Hill's house three streets over, and she does not invite him.)

The second week of May, SHIELD tempts him back into the field with a romp in northern Italy, running to ground a former HYDRA scientist rumored to have had ties to Johann Schmidt himself. It is the first mission he is given that stresses his own areas of expertise, and for a brief period, Hansel exults in the sheer, uncomplicated joy of the hunt. Some part of him is decidedly unsurprised that his own countrymen have lowered themselves to the torture of innocents, but then again, the vast majority of the witches he hunted in his youth were German; that they find hundreds of files detailing decades of experimentation feels less like a coup than an inevitability.

(When he comes home, he locks himself in his room and does not emerge for a day and a night; when he at last turns the bolt on the door and emerges into the household, he brushes aside all inquiries to his well-being. He does not want to talk about it, not the missions, nor the woman who brought them to him.

He does not return to Maria Hill's house, and she does not invite him.)

June brings a heated discussion in the ranks of the Grimm household; Clint and Kenny are knee-deep in plotting what at first appears to be a party for their father, but they argue over the terminology. Clint insists the occasion is "a very merry unbirthday" while Kenny prefers "rebirthday", and when Jason interjects that they ought to merely call it his "anniversary", all three of them nearly shatter Marina's coffee table under the weight of their objections. It takes some time for Hansel to appreciate what they are doing for him, to count the days backwards on the calender to the moment that a simple, impetuous kiss woke him from a sleep of centuries, but once he does, he is quietly pleased at the fuss on his account. Unfortunately, it isn't to be; the day of the event sees him slogging through the rain in Belgium, trudging through the muck in search of a dilapidated HYDRA bolthole than even the best analysts of SHIELD (his _Adler_ included) can't quite confirm exists. 

He calls his family from Diksmuide, the nearest major seat of civilization, and resists the urge to walk the town square and inspect the cobbles for evidence of a witch's blood, where it once etched into the cobbles.

(When he comes home, his sons throw him the party anyway, if a week late, and there is much fun and merriment to be had; it's 3 AM before most of the family retires to their beds or the nearest convenient piece of floor, but Hansel is awake, nursing Bärenfang directly from the bottle and attempting, without much success, not to be furious with the Assistant Director for nearly forcing him to miss this rare outpouring of affection from his sons.

He does not return to Maria Hill's house, and she does not invite him.)

Greece in July, chasing rumors of a HYDRA base that turns out to be a former Red Room Academy, then whispers of an immortal woman over in a miserable little piece of land now called the Czech Republic, scarcely two weeks later. Neither assignment brings much clarification and absolutely no new leads. The twinned trails of both Gretel's captors and the child they created are still twenty years cold at the end of it.

(When he comes home, he spends more time away from the house than he does within it; the range is his refuge, that and Gretel's quiet room in Medical, where the nurses have learned that they may work rather safely around him and his implacable blue gaze, as long as they don't attempt to get within arm's length of him. It's an effort not to lash out at his family, at fret-browed Will and well-meaning Kenny and Clint; he finds it easier simply to withdraw from them entirely, brooding over Gretel's unmoving shape and trying to believe that what his handler has him doing is good, constructive work, but even in the privacy of his own heart, it feels like a lie.

Searching down SHIELD's back-burner work was not what he had in mind when he asked Director Hill to make use of him, and it simmers slowly over, like a pot left too long to boil.

He does not return to Maria Hill's house, and she does not invite him.)

He's in Croatia for the entire month of August, and even before he gets on the damn plane he knows this is the straw that breaks the figurative troll's back. Clint reacts violently to the news of Hansel's assignment, as much out of hatred for the locale as furor at his Pops' recent neglect; his _Tochter_ chases his _Falki_ down the hall to comfort him in his room, and under Will's grim, white-lipped stare, Hansel gets up, grabs his pack and leaves. 

He stews on the tarmac for _hours_ before the rest of the unit assembles, and Maria, when she arrives, meets his furious gaze unflinchingly.

They find _nothing_ in Croatia, nothing but bones and files black with rot.

xxxxx

This time, he doesn't go home at all.

For three days after he returns from Croatia, Hansel acts like a man divorced from the world of the living - he floats, ghostlike, between the range and the mess hall and his sister's room in Medical. He sleeps in the chair at Gretel's bedside, showers in the tiny en-suite next door, eats only when necessary and logs in a truly obscene number of hours at the range, other agents and soldiers giving the witch hunter an incredibly wide berth. He isn't antisocial, precisely - when his sons and what few friends he has approach him in the mess, he doesn't shrug them off, but he doesn't participate in their conversations, either, his back rigid and his face tightly controlled. 

On the morning of the fourth day, Colonel William Grimm walks into Maria's office, puts his hands palm-down on the Assistant Director's desk, and says flatly, "I don't know what you've done to him, Maria, but _fix it._ "

Phone in the crook of her shoulder, Maria frowns up at him, resisting the sudden urge to stab the back of Will's hand with her ballpoint pen. "Let me call you back, Director." Down goes the phone, onto its cradle, before Maria sets her jaw, lifts her chin, a subtle expression of defiance. "Excuse me?" 

"Don't play coy," frowns the Colonel, his eyes slate grey. "You've done something to Dad. Every time he comes back from an assignment, it's worse. I need you to _fix it_ before it gets out of hand." 

"I haven't _done_ anything to Hansel to fix," she fires back, rising up out of her chair to stare him in the eye. Whether Will remembers it or not, the Assistant Director of SHIELD outranks a lowly colonel, and Maria does _not_ appreciate being dressed down in her own office. "He asked me to put him out in the field, so I put him out in the field. End of story."

"Is it really that simple?" Will's eyes narrow, the slate shading into gunmetal. "Chasing down HYDRA bases that may or may not exist? Hunting scientists that are pushing a hundred years old just so SHIELD can raid his filing cabinet?"

"That mission gave us the greatest windfall of HYDRA documents we've had since the Cold War," answers Maria, stern, and Will makes a noise under his breath that is half-snort, half-sigh.

"I know, I've seen them, remember? I'm sure our World War Two historians are contemplating suicide right about now, wanting to publish their work and being strangled by their NDA contracts. But that doesn't help my father get any closure over Aunt Gretel, does it?" The silence that falls between them speaks for itself, and Maria skates her teal gaze away, jaw tight, her teeth grinding and groaning under the pressure. When Will speaks again, it is with softer tones, more measured. "Maria, he's pulling away from us. Clint is devastated, Marishka is upset, even Brian is worried, he just won't admit it. Something has to be done." 

"I'll speak with him." 

"You might have to do more than that." Will tips his head at her, studying the combative language coded in the way she holds her frame, the squaring of her shoulders and the lift of her chin; his pupils pinwheel outwards a few degrees, and Maria can't help the slight spike of alarm as green begins to filter into his gaze, muted and murky, like algae clouding over the glass of an aquarium. "He didn't start acting like this till right before he left for Poland this spring. What happened?" 

"Nothing _happened,_ " says Maria, cross, but beneath the facade of the frost-queen her pulse has jumped to triple-time. It presses against the inside of her lips, the knowledge of the boy in the Polaroid, but she remembers Hansel's calm, calm face, and his concern for the burdens the Colonel already bears. How easy it is to forget that Will is one of the most agile minds of his generation, detecting connections on even the most subtle of hints - but this is not news that she has the right to deliver, or even collude to aid him in figuring it out on his own. Instead, she does what SHIELD does best - denial and obfuscation. "Thank you for your concern, Colonel, but I can handle it from here." 

Will, brows up, visibly divorces himself from the exchange, swallowing down his first response in favour of a more temperate second one. "He's on the range. The way Brian and Clint tell it, that's all he's been doing for the last few days." Will leans in one last time, raps a single knuckle on the blotter of her desk, his gaze glittering, both flinty and dark. "Try not to get shot. Again." As if he hadn't yet decided if she deserved the second blow any more than she did the first. 

Maria suppresses the urge to fling things at his back, both because the action would be childish, and because she knows he's right. 

She approaches the situation methodically, like she would any other conflict; she shuffles around appointments and delegates tasks until she has her schedule cleared, then locks up her office, stalks to her Humvee, drives over to the range and parks in full view of the stalls. The scar at her belly, and the fabric of her uniform, both pull a little as she steps down out of the vehicle, and Maria staunchly ignores their protests in favor of zeroing in on the sounds of a shotgun being fired at the far end of the range, with aggressive regularity. The rangemaster dutifully checks her identification before allowing her to pass, and as she walks what few scattered agents of SHIELD brave enough to share the structure with an upset witch hunter see the set of Maria's jaw and conveniently pretend not to see her. 

Hansel, when she reaches him, looks like hell warmed over. 

In angry mockery of their previous encounter at the range, he continues to fire at his target until his gun runs dry of shells, and it takes much of Maria's discipline to stand there with her ears ringing until the show of pique is finished; he shoves the weapon down on the counter with a loud _crack_ of the stock against the surface, hauls his ear protection off and slams that down next to it. His eyes are blazing in his face when he finally deigns to look at her, and what a look it is - even with shadows curving purple beneath his gaze, it's ferocious, fit to level lesser beings than the Assistant Director of SHIELD. Maria faces him down, though it takes more effort to do so than she ever imagined. Suddenly, Maria is rather more appreciative of the courage it took for a witch to stand up to this particular hunter.

"I do not see any mission paperwork," growls Hansel, suspicious, scowling at her with his hands half-curled at his sides. 

Maria doesn't flinch under the assault, folding her arms to cradle her chest. "That's because I'm not here for a mission." 

"Vhat a surprise," spits the witch hunter, a mockery of shock tempered with venom, his consonants colored heavily with German and making his words uncertain in his mouth. He doesn't say that this is the longest they have spoken on casual terms since before Poland - there is an undercurrent of it there anyway, in the tight, tense way he holds his shoulders, like he is uncertain of where he stands, yet is slowly beginning to no longer care. "I had thought hyu were well-satisfied, haffing me for hyur whipping boy." 

Maria, affronted, arches one brow and says coolly, "If you were my whipping boy, Herr Kuhn, rest assured that it would involve an actual _whip._ " 

The formal address hurts; it makes him recoil a little, makes his lip curl, a flash of eyeteeth in his seamed face. "Back to this, I see, Fraulein Hill. Or is it Assistant Director Hill?" And that stings more than she expects, it really does, but Hansel is just angry enough that he does not let things lie - instead he draws himself up to his full height, scant inches taller than Maria but enough to give him the advantage, and really lets her have it. "Tell me, have hyu found anything at all, in light of my hard work? Are hyu so much as _one step_ closer to those who harmed Gretel, or to finding the boy?" He is dangerously close to her now, radiating fury as his hands clench spasmically at his sides. "Tell me hyu haff found _something,_ some trail I may follow. Tell me hyu haff separated me from my family for some sort of gain. Tell me these missions haff not been for _nothing._ "

"You separated _yourself_ from your family, Hansel." She bears up well under the resultant glare, but Maria is undeterred. "You ought to stop pushing them away. They're concerned about you." 

He snorts, shoulders twitching as he tosses his head like an agitated horse. "And SHIELD isn't? God forbid something happens to hyur _workhorse._ " 

" _Should_ we be concerned?" She tips her head to one side, watches him carefully. "Your assignments might not seem like they have much to do with your overall goal at the time, but I assure you, every step is critical. I thought you would hold up better under the stress than this. You _wanted_ to be in the field, remember? You begged me for the privilege -"

And this is the first time that Hansel lays his hands on Maria in anger: he moves almost faster than her eye can track, snatches the front of her uniform, and in a blink he has her shoved against the side of the shooting stall hard enough to make the entire metal structure rattle. Maria reacts automatically, has her sidearm drawn and the barrel pressed into his ribcage with bruising pressure, her other hand digging into the skin of Hansel's bare wrist, the tips of her nails drawing red crescents in his flesh. Hansel's eyes, scant inches from Maria's, are almost all robin's-egg iris, his pupils mere pinpricks in a blue-green sea. 

"I do not _beg,_ " he hisses, and before he lets her go and storms out. 

Maria seriously considers shooting him in the back as he walks away, and holsters her sidearm as heads poke out from shooting stalls in Hansel's wake, watching him stalk away stiff-legged like an angry cat. When the faces turn from Hansel to Maria, however, she summons enough will to stiffen her back and snarl, "Well? _Back to fucking work!_ " and a few of them even say a reflexive "Yes ma'am" before the volley of shots in the background resumes. 

Great. Just _great._


	12. War Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some things become clearer, while others become more murky.

Maria allows Hansel most of the rest of the day to cool off, because she isn't a moron. 

The witch hunter takes the opportunity to disappear completely, and Maria doesn't blame him, honestly, though the true depths of the well of hostility simmering beneath his calm exterior had been something of a surprise. Hansel vanishes from his usual haunts - the range, the mess hall, even the Grimm household, where Will informs Maria calmly that his father has not been at home all day - and since the patriarch of the clan seems bound and determined not to be found, Maria changes her tactics. 

If the hunter cannot be hunted, instead she lays in wait for him to appear. 

Gretel's room in Medical is familiar only by virtue of its similarity to all the others like it in the wing; a square white room, one window shrouded in blinds, a single chair entrenched at the side of the bed, the gurney itself surrounded by hunched machines like roosting birds. It's strikingly monochrome, from the white paint and tile and sheets to the grey metal machinery and the dark splash of Gretel's hair, fanned out across the pillow. It's this last detail that convinces her than Hansel has not yet come to see his sister - the nurses have told her that he brushes and braids it, without fail, every time he visits - and so Maria breaches the sanctity of the room for the first time since Gretel's installment there. The air smells antiseptic, the atmosphere quiet, patient, waiting. The only noises are the quiet beeps and whirrs of the monitoring equipment, and the slow rise and fall of Fraulein Kuhn's breathing. 

It's rather like walking into an empty church, the echoing expanse of a holy place, expecting to feel it filled with the presence of God. 

Her footsteps muted, she pads to the chair (its back facing the door, of course Hansel would sacrifice visibility to interpose himself between the world and Gretel) and sits herself down in it; the upholstery is permeated with Hansel's scent, well-oiled leather, the smoky tang of gunpowder, the sharpness of his soap, and Maria takes a moment to run her fingers over the armrest, tracing the folds in the fabric, imagining how they would match up with the folds in Hansel's coat. She wonders, briefly, if anyone else has sat here in the past year and change - Hansel is fiercely protective of both his sister and his privacy, a sentiment Maria understands completely, but it seems rather a lonely existence even for a woman in a coma, her only company her brother and the beep of the machines. 

Maria folds her hands in her lap and leans forward, for the space of several heartbeats merely watching Gretel breathe, before she says quietly, "I believe we've never been introduced. My name is Assistant Director Maria Hill, of SHIELD. I'm your brother's handler." 

Gretel is still, impassive as ever, without so much as a flicker of her eyelids or a jump of her pulse. Maria has no idea if the woman in the bed can hear her, if this exercise is a futile attempt to assuage her own conscience, but she thinks: if that were me in that bed, I would not want to be so very alone.

The Assistant Director does not have much opportunity to talk to the catatonic - generally speaking, if a mission is dangerous enough to harm an agent, it is also enough to kill them outright - but Maria chooses to approach this as if she is giving a status update on an agent's progress, only to a family member and not Director Fury. Once she has couched it in language she is used to, given her thoughts a framework upon which to climb upon and bloom, the words flow much more easily; she tells Gretel of Hansel and his work at SHIELD (as much as she can without breaking confidentiality, at least), of his skills and strengths, as well as his weaknesses. If he is a legend at the range, after all, he is much more infamous in the motor pool, where quartermasters have been known to mysteriously disappear with the entire selection of keys as soon as Hansel's blonde head rounds the corner. 

There is much to say about Hansel, until suddenly there isn't; Gretel is still in the new found silence, Maria closely studying the sister of the man that fascinates her against her own will, and the rest of the words crowd against the inside of her teeth. They are silly, _ridiculous_ things, things Maria would never dare to speak aloud - things like how he still hasn't quite gotten the hang of modern-day razors and sported band-aids on his chin for weeks until Will had the brilliant notion to buy him an old-fashioned cutthroat razor, and Hansel has been clean-shaven without nicks ever since; his hate-hate relationship with anything with a motor in it, yet in the Czech Republic he had swung up onto the back of a horse like he'd been born in the saddle; the way he draws lines in salt across every window and every door on Halloween, and once on the night of what Hansel called a 'blood moon', when he had locked himself into Gretel's room with shotgun in hand and refused to allow anyone entry until dawn the following morning. 

The way he rarely smiles in truth, instead crinkling the corners of his eyes or one corner of his mouth ticking upward; the rare sound of rough laughter, the dangerous way his blue eyes gleam when he's sighted his target, and the way he moves like a predator, every motion precise.

They are things no mere commander would have noticed, and she presses her lips together to keep them from escaping before she devolves into a teenage girl gushing about her crush. 

Gretel is still, but it almost seems like she demands an accounting, and so Maria says into the quiet, "You're lucky to have someone who would sacrifice so much for you." 

"And what else would hyu have me do, Fraulein Hill? Leave her here alone, to rot?" comes a gravel-laden growl from the door, and Maria jumps about half a foot where she sits in the chair, turning over her shoulder and already knowing what she will find. It is disconcerting that a man of Hansel's sheer presence can move so silently; though he is not particularly tall by modern standards, in his heyday he would have been considered a giant, and Maria feels a frisson of his distemper as he enters the room and stands next to what is normally his chair, arms folded across his chest, eyes narrowed to pale slits. Anger flows off of him like light flows from the sun. "She is my sister. I am all she has left." 

"There are your sons," notes Maria, eying him sidelong, but Hansel shakes his head sharply almost as soon as she says it.

"They do not know her. It is very hard to love a thing hyu do not know." He's watching her when he says it, mouth turned down and his gaze cold. It feels like a challenge, and Maria bridles under that level stare, but before she can strike back he adds, "I thought I knew hyu, once."

It stings, and Maria cannot allow it to pass; she has been too long scrabbling for authority, a woman in a world run by men, to allow even someone like Hansel to piss all over her. She lifts her chin, stiffens her back, rises from the chair like a queen to unflinchingly meet the witch hunter on even terms. Her voice is quiet, but it cuts like a knife across a carotid, swift and savage. "You presume to know quite a lot, for a man who chafes under simple orders." 

A flash of teeth as Hansel leans in, voice lowered to a hiss. "I follow orders _worth_ following. Chasing ghosts across all of Europe, doing hyur heavy lifting? These are wastes of my time." 

"And who are you to decide what orders are _worth following_ or not?" Any other woman would shrink beneath that presence, the focus of his anger, but though Hansel is an intimidating man, his stare is a pale shadow of Nick Fury - and Maria is not any other woman. "SHIELD does not hunt _witches,_ Herr Kuhn -" _And that is all you are good for_ is the natural extension of that sentence, but Maria bites it back before it can leave her mouth and escalate a situation that has already deteriorated more rapidly than she could have guessed. 

" _Nein,_ hyu hunt men," spits Hansel, lip curled in a snarl, "and men are much more _mundane_ in their cruelties." 

Maria's hands tremble and shake, and she has to curl her fingers into fists to keep from strangling Hansel Kuhn here and now. For fuck's sake, how does he do it? How does this _stupid_ blonde lunk of a man cause her to forget every mote of her poise, her calm? 

She closes her eyes, takes a slow, deep breath; when she opens them again, Hansel has shifted a little bit away, hands loose at his sides and watching his sister sleep, not quite in profile to Maria, but it is clear that he's taken the opportunity to get his own temper under control. That Maria gets under his skin as easily as he worms beneath hers is not exactly a comfort, not when moments ago she could have happily bashed his head against the nearest solid surface. "I didn't come here to fight with you," she manages through grit teeth, her tone level enough even while she is picturing Hansel beaten black and blue. "Since you are unhappy with the progression of your field assignments, I thought it would be best to offer you an alternative." 

"Alternative?" he growls, wary now; she sees his fingertips rest on the topmost of Gretel's blankets, an anchor of serenity the hunter direly needs in this moment. Maria plows on ahead, flicking her gaze elsewhere. 

"There's an instructor position open at SHIELD. Weapons training and self-defense, entry level stuff, but," Maria rolls one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, "it has a fairly high clearance level, with an option to return to field work, and you'd have almost complete curricular autonomy. No one giving you orders." 

"No handler?" asks Hansel, narrow-eyed and suspicious, grasping the finer points of the offer much more quickly than Maria expected. It is difficult to remember sometimes that Will's smarts are based in their original source, that Hansel is much more intelligent than even the Assistant Director remembers to give him credit for. Maria spreads her hands at her sides, not quite a placation. 

"Not quite. I would still technically be your handler, on the paperwork, but it's an oversight position only. You break someone's neck in training, I get to explain to the Director how that happened. That kind of thing." Maria folds her arms to cradle her chest, tilts her head to the side to make her bangs fall out of her eyes. "Deployment on a volunteer basis only, and I'd still be able to give you access to any documents pertaining to the matters we've discussed. You're not going to get a better offer," she arches one brow, "not and still be _of use_ to me and to SHIELD." 

She can see the gears spinning behind those blue eyes, see him working out the effort necessary for her to come to him with this opportunity; it had involved a lot of strings pulled and papers shoveled, as well as an eleventh-hour early retirement package for the man who had previously held the position, but Maria had leaned in all the proper places, hacked through all the red tape, and made it a reality. Later, she will contemplate just how long a river of bullshit she's waded through on behalf of a man who probably thinks she's a irredeemable bitch, but in the moment she lifts her chin and _dares_ him to throw this back in her face. SHIELD has done quite a lot for Hansel Kuhn, and most of it has been at Maria's bidding. 

She almost wishes he would refute it, just so she has a free shot at smacking that calculating look off of his rugged face. 

"Alright," he says instead, and holds out the blade of his callused hand, a gesture as old as he is, the traditional sealing of an agreement; Maria is faintly grateful that he didn't spit in his palm first, and mildly startled at how fast he has folded, she eyes his hand skeptically, before returning her eyes to his face. 

"No questions asked? No terms set of your own?" From the look that flickers across his face, she's right to question how easily he gives in, though the pink in the tips of his ears is entirely unexpected. The hunter lifts his shoulders, but does not retract his hand. 

"I will get to stay home, and still be of use, informed. Hyu are right. I will not get a better offer." 

Maria unfolds her arms, puts her hand into Hansel's large one. The handshake is firm, but thankfully, not seeking to break the bones of her fingers. Having witnessed the strength in Hansel's hands, Maria is sure that such a gesture would be trivial on his part. "You have some things to sign, to make it official. I'll send them over to the house. You start at eight on Monday morning, Instructor Kuhn." 

The title makes the corners of his mouth twitch. "I think I would prefer my students to call me Herr Kuhn."

She suppresses her smile as best she can when they drop each other's hands. "I believe SHIELD can live with those terms. I'll leave you to catch up with your sister," she adds, gesturing for Gretel, even now still and quiet with her hair spread across the pillows. Maria turns on the balls of her feet, striding for the door; before she reaches it, however, Hansel says "Fraulein Hill" into the silence, and she looks back to see him with shoulders squared and his hands in his coat pockets, for the first time in this conversation seeming uncertain of himself. 

"I... have missed hyur company," he admits after a long moment, not quite looking at her face, rather at some point a few feet off to her left and down, as if it hurts to stare directly at her. "Am I still welcome, in hyur house?" 

She blinks at him in astonishment, one of her palms flat on the doorjamb, as a number of confusing, hurtful things concerning their interactions in the last several months suddenly clarify. There are many ways in which Maria can respond - simple ways, equally hurtful, that would snuff out that frail light of hope in his eyes - but Maria Hill is not a soul that seeks revenge for imagined slights. Best to go with the truth, then, as she responds quietly, "You were never _un_ welcome, in my house, Herr Kuhn." 

This time, it's her turn to slip away, her heart thudding in her chest and striving not to show it with every stride down Medical's corridors.

xxxxx

After his visit with Gretel is over, Hansel goes directly to find his youngest sons.

They aren't difficult to find. Clint and Kenny sit in front of the TV in the living room, towels spread across the coffee table and various weapons spread upon them in different stages of cleaning and assembly. It's an uncomfortable thing to see, the pair of them with their heads down, disconsolately picking at the pieces of machinery like depressed children might pick at their food. No conversation, no joking or good-natured jostling or races to complete the more simple of their tasks; instead they sit on the floor, elbows on the towels, looking as if someone has died. 

_I helped to do this,_ Hansel reminds himself with a grim press of his lips, before he grabs his shotgun and seats himself at the corner of the coffee table, claiming an unused expanse of white towel for his own. Clint looks up, grey eyes squinted in suspicion, but doesn't tell him to piss off, as he might have if he were truly angry with his father; Kenny, looking to Clint for clues as to how to proceed, sees his brother's tight shoulders and shuts his own mouth. 

Silence rules, except for the nattering of a commercial on television. 

Hansel does not look up at them, focused instead on the disassembly of his shotgun; into the quiet comes his voice, calm and level. "If hyu swear to keep them to hyurselves," he says, methodically setting pieces of oiled black metal across the towels in the order he removes them, "then I will tell hyu some things that no one else knows."

Clint eyes him sidelong, cagey and cautious, but he is a curious boy, and always has been - he cannot resist the bait that Hansel has so precisely laid. "What kind of things?" he says, unwinding a little, and Hansel can see in the corner of his eye as Kenny flicks his gaze back and forth between his father and his brother, engaged and focused, a boy watching a tennis match. 

Hansel smiles, serene, and tells him, "Hyu have not heard the _real_ story of Hansel and Gretel, have hyu?"

He starts at the beginning, of course; Hansel tells them of how he and Gretel were born in Freiburg, the heirs of a hunter long before they became hunters themselves, although Johannes Kuhn's quarry ran to deer and fox and bear, and only very rarely the sort of monstrous creatures that preyed on the children of men, for German winters were cold and wolves sometimes grew desperate. And then came Hansel's ninth year, and his father leaving them in the woods to die. Gretel forgives him for this, Hansel thinks, his sister understanding more thoroughly than he does the difficult choices laid before their parents, and choosing the lesser evil over the greater one - but then, Gretel was not in that cage in the gingerbread witch's house, was not forced to eat the magical foodstuffs, poison-green, nor made to eat even more when Hansel dared to puke them up afterward. Gretel was not pinned to a wall with a hand closed over her nose, forced to open her mouth to breathe or die of lack of air, only to find more of the disgusting sweets shoved in her face when she did so, choking on them in the quest to continue to live. 

Hansel hates his father for what he did, even now, even knowing the truth; choosing the lesser of two evils is still a choice for evil, and Hansel sees nothing commendable in his father's actions, leaving children in the cold woods to starve, or wither from the chill, or be eaten by wolves. To his sons, however, he does not impart the knowledge of Muriel, of the Blood Moon or the hunt for the heart of a Grand White Witch. That is for later - for now, it is to difficult a memory to speak of.

Instead, he tells them of how they killed the gingerbread witch, hand in hand watching her burn alive in her own oven; he tells them of his sickness afterward, of how they had barely staggered with their combined strength to the next town over, Hansel's knee (and here he pulls his trouser cuff up over his leg and shows them the scars, faded and flat, a series of dark brown lines across his skin like the raking of tree limbs, wide-spaced and savage) only half-scabbed over and the witch's candy poisoning his system, how strangers stood by unhelpfully as Gretel had to bodily drag him across the town square and up the steps of the church, his vision blurred and his muscles weak, body feverish. 

"It was the Sugar Sickness, though no one knew that at the time," Hansel says, weapons and TV forgotten, his sons raptly attentive, their eyes wide and round in their faces. "The priests of the church thought that I was dying, and anointed me with blessed water. Wherever the water touched, the pain lessened, so Gretel gave me some to drink. From there," he shifts a little, pulls the cuff of his trousers up further, to show the pale raised freckles of many, many injection scars on the skin just above his knee, "we found that it worked best with a needle, into my blood. A temporary solution, no more - it fought the witch's poison, but it could not be purged from me completely. The sickness almost killed me, many times, that day and afterward." 

Clint, his quick-minded _Falki_ , picks at the missing thread first, pouncing on the question with obvious inquisitive delight. "If this Sugar Sickness - which sounds an _awful_ lot like diabetes, by the way, I'll get you a book on it - if it couldn't be cured, then how come you aren't still sick now? I've never seen you have to inject anything since you woke up."

(And really, Hansel can't blame him for it - because how could Clint possibly know? - but the question triggers a memory, impossibly vivid, of the casting of the curse: Hansel sprawled on his back in the mud staring at the sky and unable to move, the world slowly blackening from the edges of his vision inward, as the witch leans over him with a malicious, evil smile, dark hair hanging lank around a pale moon face. 

_And don't worry about your little **problem,**_ Hansel hears in the theatre of his own mind, the witch's tones liquid and silken, _because I've taken care of that. Such a death would be far too easy of an escape for you, witch hunter._

 _I cast you into darkness, and in darkness you will **eternally** remain. Happy nightmares._ )

Hansel physically shies away from the memory, shaking his head sharply and his shoulders rising defensively, just the mere edge of the incident enough to prickle the short hairs at the back of his neck. "The curse," is all he can manage in response, a tight shrug disguising an attempt to unknot his own treacherous musculature. If speaking of Muriel is hard, then the mere _thought_ of the witch that tormented Hansel and his sister for the better part of two centuries is difficult to even begin to approach. "Hyu cannot speak of it," he adds, moving away from the subject somewhat. " _Mein Adler_ will fret like an old woman, and the doctors - I haff had enough of being poked and prodded. _Promise me,_ " he adds when neither of them respond, and their heads bob up and down in earnest agreement. 

"We promise," they chorus, and Hansel settles a bit, tells them of the times before the curse - of Edward the troll and Ben Kussman, of travel with friends and of finding that he and his sister were not the only ones of their ilk in the world. ("You did _not_ meet Little Red Riding Hood," gapes Kenny, while Clint flashes a skeptical look; Hansel merely shrugs and says, " _Rotkäppchen_ was the fiercest slayer of werewolves that I have ever known. Hyu would have _adored_ her.") By the time Hansel has nearly run out of things to say, Will and Marishka are unlocking the front door, with Brian and Jason due for dinner at any minute. He and the boys quickly reassemble their scattered weaponry, and the evening proceeds with little evidence that the Grimm patriarch poured out his past to his youngest boys, a secret for the three of them to keep. 

They make a semi-disastrous attempt at establishing a Board Game Night by playing Monopoly; Will wipes the floor with all of them, to the surprise of no one, and even if most of the family are advocating _massive_ handicaps for the eldest of Hansel's sons next time they play, by the end of it everyone is laughing and happy, the bridges unburnt, the wounds covered over and begun to heal. 

Hansel does not apologize, because words are cheap, and easy, and meaningless. Time, however - time, and effort, and the unhurried way in which he bared his soul to his younger boys, or selected property to buy and sell to his older ones - these things are _expensive_ , purchases made most carefully, crafted in such a way that the message is unmistakable. 

Just because he does not apologize does not mean they do not know he is sorry, and just because they do not say that he is forgiven his sins does not mean he is not absolved.

xxxxx

Hansel shows up at Maria's door at half past six the next evening, and she allows him back into her home and her life, almost as if he never left in the first place.

xxxxx

It's practically a ritual, after a while.

The first set of two-hour classes begins at eight AM, Monday through Friday; at noon is an hour break in the broods of new-minted SHIELD agents, which Hansel spends in the mess hall, sometimes with Maria, sometimes not - her schedule is more unpredictable than his, and in any case the senior agents often buy his meal for him, the price of admission to hear tales of Herr Kuhn and his terrified legion of pupils. Classes officially end at five, and from class Hansel heads either to the range or to Gretel's room, and then home to shower and change. 

His family dominates much of his free time - he is dead-set on not allowing the gulf once formed between them all to widen - but on Wednesdays and Fridays, by six thirty he has food in hand (what else is he going to spend his SHIELD paycheck on, anyway?) and is knocking on Maria's door, spends precisely three and a half hours in her company, and is out the door by ten, no matter the temptation he might feel to stay. 

With every night he visits, the impulse to remain grows stronger, but Hansel has not spent near to three decades hunting monsters and men without learning the value of discipline.

(Though Hansel himself is unaware of it, he's humming the main theme from _Casablanca_ under his breath as he leaves the Grimm household one September evening; Will sits at the kitchen counter and watches him go with a bemused expression on his face. "What I would give to be a fly on the wall in that house!" he laughs to Marina, shaking his head. "It's driving me crazy not knowing what they do over there."

Marina stirs the spaghetti sauce and rolls her eyes. "You don't need to know _everything,_ Misha. Here, taste," she adds, offering him the wooden spoon, and the Colonel humors her and makes no further mention of it.

Unseen in the back hallway, however, is Clint, listening thoughtfully and stroking his chin like a supervillain.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re: the blessed water - GalahadsGurl, Julorean and I have discussed Hansel's injections (at _great_ length) and determined that it had to be something readily available or easily manufactured, else they couldn't run around half of fucking Europe the way they do. What was plentiful in 1800s Europe? Churches, and priests to bless water!
> 
> We also agreed that the Sugar Sickness, while superficially similar to diabetes, was 90% more likely to be a disease of entirely magical origin, given how Hansel contracts it. So. ;x


	13. The Ceiling Incident

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or, How Kenny And Clint Learned It's A Bad Idea To Spy On A Spy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter, but more lighthearted chapter for you, and we're finally at the end of 1997 timeline-wise. 
> 
> Any missed stuff can be blamed on GalahadsGurl and Julorean, my betas. Will cookies for anyone who spots the Terry Pratchett reference.

You don't get to the top ranks of SHIELD without having an overdeveloped sense of when you're being watched. 

When Maria was very young, back at the beginning of all of this, she'd had a firearms instructor who had imparted some timeless advice: that in the spy game, paranoia is a trait of the well-adjusted and open-eyed, not the insane. It sounded cliche at the time, and still does on occasion, but the universal truth in the upper echelon of SHIELD is that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. 

That vague, metaphysical _they_ is starting to grate on Maria's nerves. 

She gets home on a Friday in October at a quarter till six; earlier last week an asset out in Kosovo had dropped completely off the grid, and when his handler had finally located him it was only because pieces of him had started to float up to the surface of the White Drin River. Maria's been knee-deep in unraveling what in the name of _fuck_ happened down there and who's responsible for it since Tuesday, when the third consecutive rank of senior agents had basically shrugged their shoulders and passed the buck to upper management, and the puzzle pieces refuse to line up no matter how she arranges them, which is infuriating, but not exactly discouraging. True analytical challenges are actually rather rare in her line of work, where almost every facet of existence is dissected and analyzed and codified within an inch of its life, and Maria enjoys a good detective story. This is why she has a cardboard file box full of possibly relevant information perched on her hip as she unlocks her front door, her mind still gnawing at the thorny problem of Kosovo like a dog worrying at a bone. She's almost considering calling the Colonel and asking him if he'd like to look over the files with her when she steps across the threshold, but Will generally has enough on his plate these days, and Maria thinks he doesn't quite enjoy the thrill of the hunt for truth in the same way that she does, taking her work home with her for the weekend, wholly invested in investigating something that's already over and done with -

She's in the front foyer when her senses snap her mind back to the present, and she knows with an absolute _certainty_ that the house is not empty. Don't ask her how she knows, because she couldn't quantify it if she tried, but she knows it in her bones, in her blood, that _there is someone else here,_ intruding on the sanctity of her home. 

The door's shut behind her, locked; she hadn't seen evidence of forced entry when she'd come in, no extra vehicles on the street that did not belong to their respective owners (and yes, Maria knows them all by heart for six blocks in all directions, she's the Assistant Director of SHIELD, not some wet-behind-the-ears pup) but that's easy enough to sidestep if someone infiltrated on foot. The house is quiet, cool and still - if it had been Marishka, beating her home for some Girl Time before Maria's fast-food dinner with Hansel, well, Marishka has a key, but she also would have turned on the TV for something to watch until Maria got home, and would have hailed her as soon as she heard Maria at the door. Given that Maria is greeted only by a sense of waiting watchfulness, she doubts the presence she feels is something so benign as her best friend. 

She sets the box of files down carefully, then draws her sidearm and goes through the house, room by room - Maria is a _professional_ , after all, and just because she hasn't had a field assignment since Croatia doesn't mean she's gone soft. She checks all the rooms and goes through all the nooks and crevices, every closet and behind all the hanging clothes and in the piles of linen, under the bed and behind every reasonably sized piece of furniture, even the insides of her shower, kitchen cabinets and (on the off-chance some pint-sized assassin has squeezed in there) the refrigerator. She finds nothing, of course, but the sense that there is someone else in the house refuses to abate; she takes the box of files from the foyer floor and moves it to the coffee table, even sits down with her sidearm on the counter and starts to absently leaf through the paperwork, but she can't focus on the problem of Kosovo long enough to distract her from that pesky feeling. 

It's driving her _up a goddamn wall_ , and what's worse, she can't really say with any certainty that the sensation of not being alone is actually _right_ or not. 

Maybe she's finally gone over the deep end; that firearms instructor from her youth _did_ eventually snap and fortify a 'base' in the produce section of his local grocery store, convinced that a display of avocados were actually live grenades and that HYDRA sleeper agents were trying to kill him in the middle of Walmart. 

(Maria wonders briefly if SHIELD will still finance her pension if she retires at the ripe old age of twenty-six.)

She's just considering getting out the bug bombs and _smoking_ out her mysterious intruder when there's a knock at her door, and Maria glances automatically at the clock. Six twenty-eight. That means Hansel, and the presence of Hansel gives Maria the kind of idea that, while perfect, also makes her feel slightly guilty and quietly excited for the mere contemplation of it. 

How do you lure out someone who doesn't want to be found? With bait, of course.

xxxxx

The thing to understand, and that Hansel has great difficulty explaining to anyone who asks (generally because the ones doing the asking refuse to believe that anything so banal could be happening in Maria Hill's private sanctum,) is that nothing really _happens_ during the time he spends with the Assistant Director. Sure, they sit quite close together, often with a blanket over their legs to share warmth, and more than once Maria has been too exhausted for watching a movie to be a good idea and fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder, which means that he's had to carry her to her bedroom and tuck her in, but it isn't as if he _stays_ in there afterward. There are none of what his few friends and his sons call "make-out sessions". There is no kissing and no touching, not beyond things that are easily construed as a friendly closeness, anyway. What intimacy they have is borne of Maria's willingness to relax in his presence, a gift in and of itself; Hansel knows how rare and precious it is, to have someone you feel comfortable enough with to watch your back as you sleep, and thinks Maria has gone for far too long without someone to trust in such a manner.

He doesn't stretch their boundaries, never pushes his luck. He has always been awkward with the elusive creature of the _available woman,_ and so he chooses to view Maria as his friend and ally instead. That he harbors deeper feelings for her - not only harbors them, but dry-docks them, refits them, gives them a fresh coat of varnish and scrapes the barnacles off of the hull - well, that's practically irrelevant. He is close to her, as close as a very technical subordinate agent can be, anyway, and they are slowly working their way back from being Fraulein Hill and Herr Kuhn to Maria and Hansel. That he values her regard highly enough not to dare risk ruining what progress he has made is almost heart-stoppingly frustrating, and the source of more than a few nights lying awake staring at the ceiling. He is a man of action, not one made to be paralyzed by indecision. 

But if Hansel has learned nothing else in the years since his dalliances with Ilse, and Mina, and all the others like them, it is this: his tastes in women run generally to those who could be considered his equal in ability, and a woman who is his equal in ability is generally able to take him to pieces if his clumsy advances are determined to be unwelcome. Best to be well-established before making the attempt. Best to be _certain_ of his place in her heart, and whether it lies above or below the belt. 

(Clint often tells him, usually with one brow up and in a flat tone, that Hansel will end up friend-zoned for life if he never makes his move. Then again, Clint Grimm, still two months shy of being able to drink legally, isn't exactly the sage authority on life experiences.)

This is why it comes as such as shock when, at six twenty-nine on an October evening, Maria opens the door to her house and _flings_ herself at the witch hunter, with anything but attack apparently on her mind. 

That they don't tumble backwards onto her porch is due to both Hansel's sturdy structure and the fact that Maria is tiny; he sees her throw herself forward, curses violently and drops the bag of food in his hands just in time to brace one foot a half-step behind him and catch her. He's nowhere _near_ the threshold when Maria starts peppering his face and jaw with hot, soft-lipped kisses, her arms twined around his neck and her legs wrapped around his midsection and _God's love_ when did his hands migrate to her ass? They just sort of landed there, he swears, honest, the soft globes of her butt in her SHIELD uniform are conveniently handy for him to grab when a hundred twenty pounds of Assistant Director comes flying through the air at him, that's just a fact of life. 

His face is probably scarlet within half a heartbeat, and all he can manage is a panicked " _Um,_ " because Hansel is just _not equipped_ to defend against this kind of assault, he really isn't. 

Her lips never make contact with his mouth, he notes after a moment to think it through, and the fact seems kind of odd until she seizes sharply him by roots of the hair (oh God) and whispers urgently in his ear, "There's someone else in the house _and I can't find them._ "

Oh. _Oh._ A distraction gambit, to draw her stalkers out of hiding. Well, he feels about a half a mile thick, then, for not having figured that out without the hint, because since _when_ was Maria Hill ever mentioned in the same sentence as unrestrained passion? But though it makes him feel a little guilty (and a _lot_ like his teenaged self from nearly two hundred years ago) he isn't exactly unamenable to playing along; just because this isn't for real doesn't mean Hansel isn't willing to squeeze every mote of enjoyment out of it that he can. That said, what do you _say_ when the woman who holds the SHIELD course record for most headshots at fifty yards with a handgun in sixty seconds has suddenly wrapped herself around you like an octopus, attacking the side of your throat like she's a starving tigress and you're a side of roast mutton? 

As it turns out, a hesitant "Oh, _mein Spatzi_ " is probably not the correct answer, because it makes the corners of his mouth quiver with repressed hysterical laughter, and Maria lifts her head to give him a level stare that needs no explanation: _don't laugh, you bastard, don't you dare fucking laugh._ Hansel buries his face in the curve of her shoulder, takes a long, _long_ moment to get himself together and remind his body and pent-up hormones that this is all for show, then walks them inside. 

They make it to the sofa in a series of crashing noises - his hip knocks a pile of pizza boxes off of the short table Maria keeps in the foyer, her shoulder pulls two framed certificates off of the wall when he backs her briefly into it, and then his shin barks on the corner of the coffee table and his weak knee, the one the witch clawed up so long ago, just buckles on him and they pitch forward. It could easily end in disaster and get either one of them seriously hurt, but Maria lands akimbo on the cushions with a flushed face and disheveled hair, Hansel manages to catch himself with his forearms on the back of the couch and his good knee between her thighs, and they're both staring at each other at a range further than they were moments ago, yet somehow closer than ever before. Hansel's heart is thudding in his throat, his skin is prickling, the gun he keeps below his belt buckle is beginning to tell him _very loudly_ that this isn't such a silly little a game anymore, and he can see that Maria's pupils are enormous in her lovely teal eyes, sprawled out of breath beneath him with every opportunity to tell him to stop. 

She reaches up with her hands into the space where his coat lays open, and smooths her palms across his chest, across his pounding heart, her expression intensely focused on her explorations. He's wearing a shoulder harness under his coat, and when she encounters the leather strap and slips a single finger playfully under it, her mouth twisting mischievously, Hansel swears for half a second that his heart stops completely. " _Mein Spatzi,_ " he says again, much softer this time, and her eyes leave his chest to alight upon his face, her gaze full of wonder, as if she has never truly _seen_ him before this moment.

"Holy _shit!_ " comes a hissed voice from up above, and Hansel remembers with a sudden chill like cold water sloshed over him that Maria has central heating, something that his sons feel very strongly about when it comes to infiltration, and that there is an open vent grate positioned directly over her couch. 

Right. Someone else in the house. No wonder she couldn't find them.

Maria reacts more quickly than Hansel does; in a split-second she shoves his coat open the rest of the way, finds the pistol snugged in its holster against his ribs, yanks it out and extends her arms up over and past his shoulders, the only courtesy she gives him before she fires in a sinuous line into the ceiling plaster. Hansel jerks away at the loudness of it so close to his head, but there's a _clomp clomp clang_ up in the ductwork, and when he pulls backwards from Maria and nearly falls over her coffee table, his hand lands on the grip of her SHIELD-issued sidearm and then he's firing into the ceiling as well. Ductwork, as his more spy-inclined sons tend to complain to him, is not exactly designed to hold the weight of a full grown human man, and movement within it is amplified due to the echoes of the metal puckering under said weight; it's not as practical a way to infiltrate as the movies would have you believe, but it has its uses, especially in covert surveillance, and if you have an opportunity to get in place before your target arrives on site. If someone manages to make your position, though, your options as to escape are extremely limited.

The one the figure in the ducts takes is to crash through Maria's ceiling in a hail of splinters and plaster dust. 

He lands on his back just past the edge of the couch, one leg hung up on the arm of the sofa and his limbs in an ungainly sprawl across the carpet, everything in the room suddenly dusted in white as if a snowstorm has pased through Maria's living room; the Assistant Director is on him in seconds, her knee pinned in the middle of his chest and the barrel of Hansel's pistol practically shoved up the intruder's left nostril. Hansel is drawing himself back to his feet for a better look at their stalker when his empty hands shoot up as far over his head as they will go in gesture of surrender, and a very familiar voice begs in a terrified paroxysm of words, _"Oh God Maria please don't kill me -"_

".... Kenny?" says Maria, squinting at the dust-covered boy she has pinned against her half-ruined carpet, after a moment removing her gun from Kenny's sinuses and her knee from his solar plexus, climbing to her feet to allow him to sit up and rub at his abused face. Hansel lets his eyes fall shut for a moment, quietly unsurprised to learn that his sons have something to do with this. 

"Kenny never works alone," Hansel sighs, turning his gaze upward for the gaping hole in the ceiling; there's just a little tuft of blonde hair visible in the gash of destroyed ductwork and insulation, and Hansel bellows a _"Clinton Francis Grimm"_ so bone-chilling that it would have made any drill sergeant weep. "Hyu get down here _right now!_ "

There's a moment of silence, before Clint cringes out into the quiet, "Through the hole?" 

"Through the - _ja_ through der fucking hole!" barks out Hansel, having at last scraped the bottom of his well of patience with his boys, and he's safetying Maria's handgun when Clint drops like a gymnast from the damn ceiling joists, landing behind his brother in a delicate crouch that belies the look on his face like a toddler expecting a spanking. 

It isn't terribly far off the mark, given that Hansel is quite inclined to ask if Maria has a wooden spoon on the premises. 

"So," says Maria, Hansel's pistol tucked into her thigh holster and her arms folded to cradle her chest, expression _incredibly_ unimpressed, "would you boys care to tell me which one of you thought it was such a _great idea_ to climb into my ceiling and spy on us? Because I would _really_ like to hear this." 

Kenny and Clint, pale with fear, both point directly at each other.

xxxxx

They end up calling Will, Marina, and the SHIELD agent in charge of base housing, in that order.

Will is pissed, but not surprised; Marina is more inclined to find the whole thing hilarious, especially when the Colonel goes red in the face shouting at his shamefaced brothers, the pair of them seated side by side on Maria's front step with blonde heads down and wearing identical hangdog expressions. (Things take a rather different turn when further interrogation proves that Will had given them the idea to do it in the first place, and then Marina plops down on the concrete walkway, holding her belly and unable breathe for laughter, and Will looks entirely ready to just walk away and write off all three of them.) The housing agent, a petite blonde woman in the standard-issue skirt that Maria wouldn't be caught dead wearing, is pacing on the grass and talking on a brick-sized cell phone, an occasional burst of profane language and violent gesture at odds with the agent's angelic visage. Apparently, the estimates to repair the damage from a full-grown man falling out of the central heating aren't adding up in ways the agent likes. 

Maria and Hansel are over by the mailbox leaning against Maria's Humvee, watching the scene unfold before them with a calm that is only a thin veneer for the uncertainty written in the way they hold themselves, Maria hugging her elbows to herself and Hansel with his coat buttoned up all the way to his chin, his hands in his pockets and his eyes carefully finding everything to look at that isn't Maria's face. 

She's the one who speaks up first. "About - all that -"

"It worked," says Hansel, shrugging one shoulder upwards; it's the best thing he can come up with to say, when all he really wants to do is ask _can we do it again, but for real this time._

Two, three heartbeats of silence. "Yes. Yes it did." 

He doesn't ask any of the questions that crowd against his lips, doesn't say any of the things that he desperately wants to - things like _did you mean it when you kissed me_ and _are we ruined as friends_ and _can you ever forgive me_ , which is ridiculous, given that she started the whole damn thing, and that there isn't a long enough cold shower in existence to dim the memory of what has transpired, even if it was all an artifice of deceit. So many words and all of them are useless. 

Thankfully, Maria, in characteristic fashion, cuts right through all of the bullshit: she scoots over against the side of the Humvee, closer to Hansel, and sticks her left hand into his right coat pocket, finding his fingers warm inside and twining them with her own, where no one else can see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Mein Spatzi_ \- my little sparrow (diminutive).


End file.
